archive for the ‘our culture & processes’ category

What we’re reading

22 August 2011 | Editor

[August/ summer 2011] People are our greatest asset. And PARC is often asked for expertise about its various domains -- spanning physical, computational, social, and life sciences -- as well as a "trend-setter's" perspective on what's next. But what are WE paying attention to or learning about? Well, here's a "flash-sampling" of what our folks happen to be reading just now -- books, magazines, blogs -- and why...

From lean startups to open innovation success

28 July 2011 | Lawrence Lee

A startup is any organization of any size dedicated to creating something new under conditions of uncertainty; the challenge is how to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a path to a successful, sustainable business. I'm not going to restate all of the points in Eric Ries' PARC Forum talk -- you can watch it here -- instead, I want to share how we’ve been practicing similar concepts at PARC and compare and contrast some specific Lean Startup methods with our practices in Open Innovation. One key difference for example is in the strategy of MVP.

Making work visible: For business practice transformation

19 April 2011 | Peggy Szymanski

"Murky" can describe problems in organizations where you see the cloudy fog obscuring what you’re trying to get at, but you don’t know what’s behind it. "Wicked" can describe problems in organizations that are too tangled to tease apart, politically loaded, or just plain difficult. Whether you want to tactically address an acute process problem in a specific department, or strategically transform the way an entire company fundamentally operates, learns new practices, or engages at the critical "customer front", ethnography-based work practice study is a powerful tool for making work visible...

How to build a cleantech portfolio (or: just about anything)

6 April 2011 | Scott Elrod

[contributed post to SmartPlanet] When PARC, a Xerox company, became an independent subsidiary in 2002, we were free to consider entirely new directions and industries. Cleantech was one of our first efforts to take the deep competencies and expertise we cultivated solely for Xerox, and apply them to problems and needs for other clients. But how did we align our idealistic motivations – concern for the environment, desire for impact – with commercial realities? Here are some of the strategies that helped us resolve conflicting goals and move from possibility, to reality... including knowing WHAT to start, and knowing WHEN to stop.

Managing research as an investment portfolio

22 February 2011 | Lawrence Lee

[contributed post to Xconomy] How do we balance the seemingly conflicting goals of long-term research vs. short-term profits, of creating breakthrough innovations vs. providing client services, of diversifying research into many markets vs. developing critical mass in just a few?

Mythbusting: Corporate ethnography and the giant green button

20 December 2010 | Editor

Because ethnography provides a complete, nuanced, and valid picture of people’s practices, processes, and product use in context, it’s a powerful tool that can provide actionable insight and reduce corporate R&D risk. The pioneering use of social scientists in technology corporations -- often referred to as corporate ethnography -- has largely been attributed to, well, us. But this isn't intended to be a who-begat-whom post. We're just trying to set the record straight on the popular tale of ethnography at PARC, because the way the story unfolds reveals how powerful a tool it can be...

CCN now supports Android

4 November 2010 | Jim Thornton

Yesterday's network architecture simply does NOT suit today's proliferation of multimedia, data, and mobility in a broadly connected world.

The best way to invent the future is to predict it

5 October 2010 | Editor

[40th anniversary special] "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." PARC researcher Alan Kay is widely attributed as having said this here. However, we don’t know this for sure; as Bob Metcalfe aptly shared with us recently (and he was quoting Alan Kay who in turn was quoting Robert Heinlein) – good stories are rarely true. But we're not trying to share a story with you here... what we want to share is a glimpse into what PARC alumni, employees, and invited friends of PARC predicted that we as a company would (or should) be working on in the future… the next 40 years. There’s also a separate 4-minute video with luminaries sharing their predictions with us in person. Because why can’t the best way to invent the future be to predict it??

Ethnography in Industry: Methods for distributed & large data sets (part two)

30 August 2010 | Nick Yee

We believe that virtual worlds and similar Web 2.0 spaces hint at an emerging mixed or "hybrid" ethnographic methodology that depends on agile collaborations between quantitative researchers, qualitative researchers, and software engineers. This is not just an academic enterprise. The ability to glean this data has many implications for designing and scaffolding online communities, learning new aspects of personality and social behavior in online worlds, and mapping digital personas to physical needs. The ability to leverage this architecture for more tailored marketing is one commercial opportunity. In addition to inferring basic demographics, personality inferences may lead to more nuanced methods of targeted advertising. And the ability to infer demographics based on online interaction metrics helps fill in the gaps left from zip code segmentation alone -- after all, not everyone who lives in your neighborhood (or in your home!) is exactly like you...

Ethnography in industry: Objectives?

27 April 2010 | Victoria Bellotti

All of us have encountered a lot of confusion and misconceptions about ethnography, especially relative to the many methods that can be used to inform technology design. In my first post here, I’d really rather respond to the obvious and eminently reasonable question I often hear in my work as a researcher in the field of user-centered technology innovation: “What’s it good for, in my business?” In today’s hard-nosed and often economically trying times, ethnography can be seen as a tactical weapon enabling companies to gather new insights and thus gain advantage over their competition. Ethnographers’ data collection and analysis methods have therefore been condensed, recombined, adapted – both systematically and as-needed – to meet these business demands.