Ethnographic work in industry has spent two decades contributing to making products that matter in a range of industry contexts. This activity has accounted for important successes within industry. From the standpoint of ethnographic practice, however, the discursive infrastructure that has been developed to do our work within product development is now a limiting factor. For practice to evolve, we must look critically at the ways in which our current successes are indicators of a kind of stasis and that change is a matter of radically redefining the kinds of business problems ethnographic work should address and the values and behaviors associated with how we do our work.
While ethnography has been integrated into the design research, new product development and corporate strategy, it has been less well integrated into path‐finding for new business opportunities. We've developed a model for path‐finding research that has three core parts: creating a business opportunity hypothesis from social flux, testing and validating the hypothesis, and catalyzing opportunities for the corporation. We provide a case study of how we used the approach around The Data Economy. We highlight three important aspects of the approach: shift of research focus from context to ecosystem; robust action, rather than funnel development for concepts, and present a tool we created called the Business Opportunity Canvas to convey research findings into action. We then highlight the direct implications of this shift for ethnographic projects, from a focus on how knowledge is produced and description of context, to an analysis of society and culture. We have not spelled out the entire process but have created a minimal viable product that can be experimented upon. Keywords: path‐finding, ethnography, business opportunities, methods, case study, ecosystem, robust action, innovation, transformation.
When we offer something to another person, community, or organization, we create the conditions for some sort of value to be created. This proposition about value creation remains at the heart of all ethnographic work in industry, and it has framed EPIC's exploration of Renewal, the theme set for this year's conference in Savannah. What does it mean to do something that is valued? How is that value organized and shaped in everyday life, in the workplace, in ethnographic practice itself, from methodologies to questions of ethics? As a broad and diverse community of practitioners, is there such a thing as "our" value? Should "we" expect ever to standardize it in those terms? These were just some of the provocative questions raised by the content shared at EPIC 2012. Indeed, both the opening and closing keynotes demonstrated this complicated dance of renewal and value creation in very personal and specific ways. Architect Emily Pilloton opened this year's conference with a story about how she and Matthew Miller, her partner at Project H, provided a group of high school students in Bertie County, North Carolina with the skills and tools to begin to rejuvenate their community. Emily and Matthew, who is also an architect, lived in Bertie County for three years, working unpaid as teachers at the local high school. There they designed a learning curriculum, studio environment, and shaped day-to-day interactions with students and the community that produced a set of compelling physical environments for the County. Emily's story, inspirational on so many levels, raised additional important and troubling questions, including what kinds of value are realized on either end of this relationship between Project H and Bertie County, and how does that value unfold over time and for whom?In his closing keynote, Philip Delves Broughton stressed the inevitability of dealing with value in terms of sales. We're always selling, argued Delves Broughton, as he observed that sales are tied, inextricably, to personal worth. If you believe you have something to offer -a thought to explore with
EPIC2015 was notable for so many excellent reasons. First, the conference took place in an extraordinary city with a vibrant and growing population of EPIC people. Holding the conference in São Paulo enabled an influx of new participants and presenters from Latin America, expanding the community and conversation with new colleagues and stakeholders as well as new ways of thinking about people that develop out of different cultural perspectives.Second, we celebrated our first double-digit birthday-10 years! Our birthday gave us the opportunity to reflect on the paths paved by individual practitioners and EPIC as a community over the last decade, and how we will use that history to pave our future. We owe many thanks to the local participants who welcomed EPIC and so many practitioners from the US, Europe and Asia. INDUSTRY DAYThis year we held a pre-conference event we called Industry Day, created specifically for the São Paulo community to get to know more about some of the many businesses practicing ethnographic work across a range of contexts. Our premier sponsors presented to a standing-room-only local audience of approximately 300 people. The energy in the room was palpable as we heard from major global corporations and international consultancies.Companies like Intel and Steelcase have made pioneering investments in ethnographic work; as Izabel Barros noted, Steelcase has been "building bridges between people, process, technology and space" since it registered its first patent in 1914 after fieldwork revealed the immense value of a fireproof wastebasket. Melissa Cefkin reported on more recent initiatives in the automotive industry, where Nissan understands the critical importance of asking, "What are the social practices of the road? How can automomous vehicles live as effective social actors in diverse locations?" Industry Day sent clear messages about the value of ethnographic praxis. We can change the world not just because we understand the social and human factors that drive it, but because we have shown we can make powerful contributions that affect the future. As Johannes Suikkanen from Gemic put it, in this era of discontinuity, ethnographic thinking informs "not just business questions, but existential questions."
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