




Intel Corporation
Intel Corporation
Intel Corporation
Intel Corporation
While ethnography has been integrated into the design research, new product development and corporate strategy, it has been less well integrated into path-finding for new business opportunities. We’ve developed a model for path-finding research that has three core parts: creating a business opportunity hypothesis from social flux, testing and validating the hypothesis, and catalyzing opportunities for the corporation. We provide a case study of how we used the approach around The Data Economy. We highlight three important aspects of the approach: shift of research focus from context to ecosystem; robust action, rather than funnel development for concepts, and present a tool we created called the Business Opportunity Canvas to convey research findings into action. We then highlight the direct implications of this shift for ethnographic projects, from a focus on how knowledge is produced and description of context, to an analysis of society and culture. We have not spelled out the entire process but have created a minimal viable product that can be experimented upon. Keywords: path-finding, ethnography, business opportunities, methods, case study, ecosystem, robust action, innovation, transformation.
Very nice chart – and we need more puns like “FOC it”!