Cast Study—This case explores a business strategy development project run by Stripe Partners for a London-based online healthcare company, Dr Ed. The first part lays out the details of the process: an intense four-day ethnographic research programme called the ‘Studio’ involving the Dr Ed senior...
Tag: strategy
Building Bridges between Management and the Workforce
This paper examines the sales force in a retail setting, considering how Business Anthropology can enlighten managerial practices as a means to defining organisational strategy. Specifically, we look at sales force engagement, motivation and reward – considering how to build bridges in the...
Tutorial: From Research to Action – Leading Teams Through Synthesis
Learn strategies and abductive methods for key challenges in the synthesis stage of research and design projects. Overview This video has been edited to protect the privacy of participants in the live tutorial....
Tutorial: Systems Theory in Strategic Practice
This tutorial will help you use systems theory and mapping methods to understand and make change in the world around you. Overview This video has been edited to protect the privacy of participants in the live...
Leveraging Speculative Design to Re-Imagine Product Roadmaps
Businesses often have strategic visions for the future of a product space; however, identifying and building toward preferable futures is a daunting task, especially when designing for complex systems, e.g., Digital advertising platforms that include multiple complex interfaces and internal...
Going with the Gut: The Case for Combining Instinct and Data
"The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut," Otellini said. "My gut told me to say yes." So said the ex-CEO of Intel, ruing his decision to pass on the...
Ethnographic Expertise as Visionary Catalyst of Collaboration
Recent developments in the scholarship of ethnography, combined with growing recognition of the value of collaboration in business, present industrial ethnography with the opportunity to exercise greater agency and leadership. This paper considers updates to theory and practice of ethnographic...
Knowing That and Knowing How: Towards Embodied Strategy
This paper explores two different forms of knowledge. We compare embodied understanding with propositional or abstract knowledge. Ethnographic research, with its commitment to understanding through immersion and engagement in social fields produces dexterous, intuitive and practical cultural...
Transforming a Financial Institution: The Value of UX Professionals
Application of a user-centered approach rooted in ethnographic methodologies facilitates a major European bank’s transition to a business strategy based on understanding people’s needs, behaviors, values and motivations. Three UX case studies conducted over three years illustrate our educator,...
Practice, Products and the Future of Ethnographic Work
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...