This case study offers an in-depth analysis of the foundational role of documentation for software quality,...
Tag: startups
Who and What Drives Algorithm Development: Ethnographic Study of AI Start-up Organizational Formation
The focus of this paper is to investigate deep learning algorithm development in an early stage start-up in which edges of knowledge formation and organizational formation were unsettled and contested. We use a debate by anthropologists Clifford Geertz and Claude Levi-Strauss to examine these...
What Anthropology Brings to Innovation: John Sherry / A Profile
John W. Sherry, Director the Experience Innovation Lab at Intel Corporation, is a Keynote Speaker at EPIC2016—join us! “Anthropology is really undersold.” Dr. John Sherry’s words carry weight—he is Director of the Experience Innovation Lab at Intel Corporation. In addition to discovering ways to...
Everybody’s a Winner: How Unidimensional Scaling up as an Entrepreneurial Rite of Passage is Beginning to Be Resisted in India’s Startup Capital
Taking India's startup capital Bangalore as its field, the paper researches the absence of conventional scale as a potentially positive emic experience for the entrepreneur. The study leverages a mixed methods approach, employing semi-structured interviews with select entrepreneurs, employees,...
From ‘Cool Science’ to Changing the World: The Opportunity to Support Pre-startup Science Commercialization through Ethnography and Human-centered Design
Introducing an emerging context for human-centered design work, this paper extends previous EPIC literature on startup innovation upstream into university science commercialization. It provides new perspectives on how the human-centered design community can engage with scientific models of agency...
Goodbye Empathy, Hello Ownership: How Ethnography Really Functions in the Making of Entrepreneurs
Human-Centered Innovation has come to be known as the central discipline in the entrepreneurial arena. Through three-years of directorship at Innovation Studio Fukuoka, a “citizen-led” innovation incubation platform in Japan, multiple approaches have been investigated and thus learned a successful...
Meaningful Innovation: Ethnographic Potential in the Startup and Venture Capital Spheres
The aim of this paper is to explore the potential for ethnographic approaches in technology startups and the venture capital firms that support and control them. The current practices and model of innovation aim for “disruptive innovation,” but most efforts fall short, prioritizing mass diffusion...
On AI Natives and the Business of AI
Pizza robots, pandemic trackers, altered carbon, the perfect tiktok lineup, that instagram lipstick filter, that racist sensor that filtered the victim, national citizen trackers, my deepfaked face on Okoye's body while I slay Kill Monger's men....We live in an AI world. Nascent and frivolous as...
Empathy, More or Less: Scaling Intermediary Experiences of Emotion and Affect in Innovation
Questions of scale permeate current approaches to empathy in applied human-centered work—and especially design thinking—but they have remained largely unquestioned. What is more, empathy has become an empty signifier, and empathizing is often a near-formulaic and pro-forma endeavor. To catalyze a...
Why Venture Capital Needs Ethnographers: Making Meaningful Innovation in the Startup Sphere
Innovation in the startup world is broken. Startups say their aim is “disruption”—a riff on Christensen’s definition, but much less precise. “Disruption” has been appropriated by startups to mean doing something that has widespread, radical impact. They are about “changing the world.” They’re...