Ethnography for Opportunity Discovery & User-centered Design

The likelihood that companies will miss or stifle innovations increases when the potential innovations involve expertise from different industries or knowledge of different technologies. -- Rosabeth Moss Kantor, Harvard Business Review

Strategic innovation is the only way for companies to stay ahead of the competition, retain customers, enter new markets, or recapture eroding market share. If products and services are developed with a deep understanding of customer needs, promising markets, and emerging trends, there is a much greater chance of adoption and retention.

However, many companies face challenges in targeting their innovation and development efforts, such as:
-	difficulty identifying and selecting opportunities — especially for mature companies whose entrenched expertise may prevent them from seeing new possibilities for familiar capabilities;
-	inability to anticipate emerging trends — especially when the trends arise from unfamiliar sectors, technologies, or markets; and
-	taking a technology-driven rather than user-directed approach to product/service design — which leads to ill-suited or impractical devices and systems and subsequent customer/profit losses.

The Solution

By using ethnography to target and develop opportunities, PARC ethnographers help companies:

• identify potential markets and business opportunities;
• understand existing solutions in terms of their use and shortcomings;
• understand how a new product/service must improve on the status quo to be successful and offer unique value;
• determine which research/technology capabilities and other intellectual assets would give the company competitive advantage;
• develop solution specifications that meet end-user needs and desires;
• align solutions with clients’ existing businesses and assets;
• prototype and test solutions throughout the design to verify assumptions and refine the product/service; and
• capture the landscape – including adjacent opportunities and potential partnerships for the company – in which the product/service is situated.

The result: greater satisfaction and loyalty, better innovation investments at minimal risk, and reduced time-to-market for strategic innovations.