In the weeks following EPIC2016 our community has been reflecting on the inspiring presentations we heard, building on the new connections we made, and incorporating the exciting ideas and techniques we learned about into our work. (Some of us are also working off the fried-everything-on-a-stick Minnesota State Fair extravaganza.)

If you participated, but especially if you didn’t, don’t miss these round-ups:

1. Reve Consulting offers Seven Takeaways from EPIC2016, from moving quickly while providing value, to using our everyday work as a vehicle for social change. We agree with Reve that the EPIC2016 prize for “what you didn’t know you needed to know” goes to Adina Daar:

“Knowing about how meerkats learn to eat scorpions by starting with dead ones helped her learn how to facilitate focus groups.”

2. Are you blue in the face trying to explain the value of “the kind of in-depth research that doesn’t easily lead to a full database of numbers or series of elegant charts”? In his Star Tribune article “In the Age of Data, Businesses Can’t Forget about Observation,” award-winning business journalist Lee Schaefer concludes,

“Now ethnography doesn’t sound ivory tower, it sounds like common sense.”

If you’re looking for something to share with a skeptical executive, this one hits the spot.

3. Josh Dresner of Claro Partners riffs of the words of John F. Sherry Jr. in his opening keynote: ““Anthropology is to engage in radical agitation.” He describes EPIC2016 presentations that demonstrated the “Growing Importance of Anthropology in the C-Suite,” as well as those that tackled the next step:

“Anthropology has raised its profile in corporate America and across the business community globally…. The question now is what responsibility comes with having that voice?”

4. EPIC Board President Maria Bezaitis distills the passion and purpose with which EPIC People come together in her piece “Our Collective Project of Change“, where she calls us to action:

“We have an activist agenda because we engage with partners and business divisions that don’t understand business opportunities in terms of what is meaningful to people….  If our motto is to advance the value of ethnography in industry, we want to do so by enabling you who are doing the tedious and hard work of change to stand out in your home organizations, to work more effectively with partners, and to grow into new areas of value.”

5. Finally, the wonderful Nora Morales, who curated superb PechaKucha sessions for EPIC2015 and EPIC2016, allowed us to share some of her graphic notes from keynote speakers John F. Sherry, Jr, John W. Sherry, and Karen Ho. Enjoy!

Pathmaking, A Dialogue

Notes from the EPIC2016 collaborative keynote address:

Wayfinding in Marketing and Consumer Research: Doppelgänger’s Dilemma
John F. Sherry, Jr., Herrick Professor of Marketing, Mendoza College of Business, and Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame

Pathmaking as Game Creation Ways
John W. Sherry, Director, User Experience Innovation Lab, Intel Corporation

Finance, Precarity, and the Dismantling of Organizations: New Challenges for the Anthropology of Corporations

Notes from the Keynote Address by Karen Ho, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities