archive for the ‘our milestones’ category

Ubiquitous Computing: For business

19 April 2011 | Bo Begole

There’s a big gap in publications about technology business. There are technical books that explain the low-level details of technologies, how they work, and how to piece them together. There are vision books that describe how the world will change dramatically and inspire us to think beyond what we see today. Then there are business books that explain how to manage and operate technology companies. While such books provide comprehensive and complete explorations within their genre, they tend to gloss over the important aspects of the other genres. Technical books leave business readers wondering why a capability matters, business books lack technical novelty, and vision books leave us all wondering, “Um…okay. Now what?” With Ubiquitous Computing for Business, I try to bridge these gaps by describing a set of innovation case studies around ubiquitous computing and the business implications thereof...

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...

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...

PARC Innovations Update (2010 #4)

21 October 2010 | Editor

[e-newsletter archive ~September-October 2010] celebrating 40 years

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??

It’s time to reap the context-aware harvest

21 September 2010 | Bo Begole

It's ironic that following the invention of the Personal Computer workstation and laptop computers at PARC, researchers would then turn toward making the computer disappear. To most people at the time, having a single “personal” computer was a dream, but Mark Weiser and many others envisioned that we’d soon all have more than just one personal computer in our lives... Today, context awareness isn't about devices and location - it's about people getting things done.

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.

Innovation: defining, doing, measuring

31 March 2010 | Mark Bernstein

[The Economist invited us to contribute an abridged version of this post, "How do you define innovation?", for their blog.] Innovation is a sorely overused word. Yet we are constantly asked to define it. A number of theorists and practitioners have offered up their variations: product innovation, business model innovation, technology innovation, design innovation, radical innovation, incremental innovation, disruptive innovation, open innovation…and so the list goes on. All are useful; none are complete. I don't have a pat answer, catchy definition, or compelling metaphor for this. But here’s what I do know: however it is defined, innovation is a valuable change, unconstrained by the way things are. I think I can safely claim that we’re speaking from experience…

Shift Happens (at PARC)

3 March 2010 | Mark Bernstein

PARC hosted a fieldtrip for TTI/Vanguard attendees following their recent "Shifts Happen" conference in San Francisco. [Through private conferences that they describe as "part classroom, part think-tank, and part laboratory", TTI/Vanguard is a forum for senior-level executives that links strategic technology planning to business success.] Surprisingly, the questions I was asked before and after the demo-presentation tour weren’t that different. Basically, folks were looking for simple answers or replicable formulas to some pretty fundamental challenges: How do we do what we do? How do we do it differently than before? How do we make the right choices? There's no single formula, but...

On keeping U.S. innovation competitive

18 November 2009 | Tamara St. Claire

PARC today is no longer “Xerox PARC” but a commercial entity with multiple Fortune 500 and other clients. We're building our contemporary innovation model by positioning ourselves at the heart of industrial R&D, government contracts, and world-class university research. (For us, the last one is translated as bringing together the top minds from diverse fields: our talent is our primary asset.) To support the next waves of innovation, we need to examine how the rest of the U.S. and world will replicate Silicon Valley – with its access to top talent, multicultural citizens, venture infrastructure and corporate partners, universities, and inexhaustible energy. But here’s the thing: two-thirds of our commercial income comes from abroad. Asia, in particular, is aggressively probing for new engines of innovation.