archive for the ‘PARC Forum’ category

Videos you can watch anywhere: Experts on a variety of topics

21 December 2011 | Editor

PARC Forum is our invited expert speaker series -- and public platform -- for exchanging insights and building relationships with leading experts in a variety of areas. An amazing variety of speakers including Nobel Prize laureates, CEOs, industry-leading thought leaders and other personalities have spoken in the series since 1977. You can watch recent videos on our website at www.parc.com/forum and on our Slideshare channel (in HTML5 and mobile viewable on iPads, iPhones, Android devices).

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.

Building an “ecosystem” to fulfill a novel technology’s promise

16 November 2010 | Jennifer Ernst

Just how do novel technologies evolve from concept to market? Let's take the example of printed electronics (and its evolution at PARC), which may provide some insight into this question. Besides displays, printed electronics enables new applications from lighting and photovoltaics, to RFID, batteries, memory, and sensors. Given the diversity of applications, how do we move from the fundamental research that unlocks new possibilities, to the market impact of addressing what's needed? Especially when you don't really have a market, but an enabling technology. Especially when each of the players in the market has different technical demands, different distribution and support requirements, and different adoption challenges. And especially when considering that for enabling technologies, there’s a special challenge – you have to choose which markets to concentrate your efforts on, while remaining flexible enough to change as market conditions dictate. So how does one move from establishing expertise and demonstrating feasibility, towards commercial impact?

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.

Ethnography in industry: Methods overview (part one)

14 June 2010 | James Glasnapp

It's really hard for companies to understand ethnography -- even after they understand what objectives it can be used for. In this second post in our series on ethnography, I thought it might be useful to provide an overview of data COLLECTION methods (and methodologies) that ethnographers use to understand a particular population or situation of interest; while specific needs vary, for our clients the general goal is to help them address a murky problem or innovate differentiated products. Note the emphasis on data "collection" as opposed to data ANALYSIS...The science and art of ethnography is not in a preset formula for these individual methods. It's in the selection, unique combination, customizations, and analysis -- which together can yield the "deep" understanding that in turn inspires innovation, or fosters change. There IS a method to the madness.

PARC Forum online

26 May 2010 | Sonal Chokshi

We're pleased to announce that we're now streaming our popular PARC Forum videos live at www.justin.tv/parcinc. You can also watch videos anytime at www.parc.com/forum, and now also at www.slideshare.net/parcinc. Be sure to subscribe to email announcements or feeds for regular updates about upcoming talks and more.

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.

Workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation: Reports

12 January 2010 | Sanjay Kairam

PARC recently hosted the first of two co-organized and NSF-funded workshops on Technology-Mediated Social Participation. Workshop reports addressing themes such as integrating theory across levels from the individual to the community; developing new methods of measuring social connections and social capital across networks; and building an infrastructure for reliable and responsible data collection are now available.