Global fast moving consumer goods companies are faced with significant challenges on all fronts as start-ups challenge brands, retailers’ private labels challenge margins and technology giants like Amazon and Alibaba challenge the entire business model. To survive in this environment, FMCGs must,...
This paper examines how ethnographic praxis as a means for driving social change via industry, went from a peripheral, experimental field, to a normalized part of innovation and product development – only to be coopted from within by a new language of power. Since the 1980s anthropologists have...
Tutorial Instructors: COURSE MATERIALS Clicking on the following links will automatically download course materials in PDF format. Context Mapping Template Methods Evaluation and Definition Template Guiding Criteria Definition...
Research collaboration and methods development within user-centered design and the emerging discipline of user-driven innovation have traditionally taken place in research institutions and large forward-looking enterprises. Due to this fact, concepts, methodologies, approaches have primarily...
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...
It's difficult for researchers in industry to focus their stakeholders on the future, given the relentless...
Book Review: What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? Edited by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga 256 pp, MIT Press "Imagine a positive Africa—creative, technological, and scientific in its...
When ethnographic or market research is employed to help de-risk potential products and services, the focus is typically on understanding markets, cultures and contexts external to the organization that would launch them. This paper shifts the focus to the sorts of organizational practices,...
Building on participatory innovation, and taking a personal and analytical autoethnographic approach we set out to investigate how innovative initiatives emerge in the interaction of multiple stakeholders across different organizations. As researchers, we are interested in understanding the lived...
At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I was enjoying a salad with a technology executive, in your typical CES “let’s grab a quick lunch in between two meetings that are only one hotel but somehow one hour apart from each other”. The executive was describing all the research that...