Maish at elearningpost points to a very neat article on PDMA : How "applied ethnography" can improve your NPD research process,  by Elisabeth Sanders. This article covers some basic ground on what this technique is, how it is better than traditional focus groups for the New Product Development process, some applications and examples where it has led to NPD and a glimpse into how its done. 

Very interesting for anyone in the business of developing new products or future scenarios !

Some excerpts :

On providing breakthroughs : 

"At Motorola, ethnographers found that Chinese businessmen working in rural areas with no telephone service had developed an elaborate system of using pagers to send coded messages. That discovery led Motorola to develop a twoway pager for the Chinese market." 

"Ethnographers experience the world of technology in the users' own environments, observing their activities that have personal, idiosyncratic meanings and a direct impact on their daily lives. Ethnographers translate what they see for Microsoft product teams and that input directly impacts on how features are designed so that they can be successfully used in the "real world." In essence, ethnographers bring the voices of real people to the software development process"

On how it compares with traditional research methods like focus groups :

"Traditional focus groups rely primarily on "What people say." But this data is limiting. There are many reasons why people say what they say, and why they don't say other things. And there are many thoughts and feelings people are not able to put into words. These thoughts include tacit or inexpressible information which does not have a chance of being expressed when using research methods that rely solely on what people say. Even the new computeraided, language context analysis tools such as the use of CALCAT, described in the October 2001 issue of Visions, are limited to what people are able to put into words.  Applied ethnography, on the other hand, draws simultaneously from a number of different research methods. It listens to what people say, while at the same time watching what people do and what they use. Applied ethnography is the best way to discover the difference between what people say they do and what they really do in their daily lives. Since it allows the use of multiple converging perspectives - what people say, do, and use, it will always reveal more and provide greater insight than will the single perspective of "What people say." This deeper level of understanding is what is needed in order to drive real innovation from the customer's point of view during the Fuzzy Front End of the NPD process."

On combining types of research - something qualitative researchers in particular are getting special training on in recent years (see Bricolage - How its Redfining Qualitative Research) : 

"Applied ethnography of the self-reporting variety can work well together with traditional focus groups. This combination is, in fact, an effective and cost-effective approach. Participants must agree to do some homework prior to coming to the focus group. The homework consists of completing the self-observation workbook that is either sent or hand-delivered to the participants at least one week before the focus group. Researchers used this combination in the early 1990s to develop the Zip drive and reposition the Iomega company. In the study, participants were sent disposable cameras and a workbook to fill out before joining the focus groups. They were asked to take pictures of all the places they worked. In the focus group, they introduced themselves by showing their photographs while they explained what they did at work. The photographs and the descriptions they gave of all the "stuff" they used at work were crucial for helping the design team to understand the relationships people had to their information - the main type of "stuff" that interested the research team. This understanding provided the content for the positioning taken by Iomega to introduce the new Zip product line with the line , "Because it's your stuff." "

I'd shared some of my experiences on how much richer is the data you get from an applied ethnographic approach than from conventional focus groups, a while ago. 

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