Fieldwork after three years #taiketukee
Sitting here at the end of Day 1, Fieldwork on the local culture of coastal Ostrobothnia in Finland, the oldest settled part of the country and where the language and cultural minority of Finland, the country – only 5.2% of the total population, the Swedish-Finnish community, is in the majority. We drove down from Espoo. […]
Exploratory User Research to Inform and Inspire Innovation Frontiers: Nokia’s legacy
Swedberg (2020) offers a glimpse of the legacy of an exploratory approach to research. The reasons for using such an approach, based on his analysis, are: The empirical situation makes it necessary to use an exploratory approach. Swedberg (2020) gives the example of a study conducted in 1937 by Lazarsfeld & Stouffer on the effects […]
Frame Insights: Going back to first principles in the Innovation Planning Process
After conducting research, we need to bring structure to what has been found and learned. We sort, cluster, and organize the data gathered and begin to find important patterns. We analyze contextual data and view patterns that point to untapped market opportunities or niches. Finding insights and patterns that repeatedly emerge from multiple analyses of […]
Pasteur’s Quadrant and Ethics: Research framing among lower income and rural people
When I forget myself, I come back to this photograph to remind me of whom I really work for and why. His name was never asked because he was much older, and thus respected. One could only call him aap (thou). He was my first interviewee for The Prepaid Economy project, more than 6 years […]
New Market Analysis: It all boils down to Interpretation
This isn’t a new diagram for anyone familiar with my writing. Its a diagram I’ve been using to explain where my work fits into the innovation development process since I first saw it on Luke Wroblewski’s blog back in 2006. However, I’ve just been struck forcibly by the realization that there’s a very important piece […]
Part 4: The visual documentation of the original research on rural economic behaviour
I have uploaded a PDF synopsis of the fieldwork conducted during the original Prepaid Economy research including approach and methodology. Also documented are the different ways those in the rural economy manage their ‘investments’. These images support the observations documented in Part 2 and my thoughts on rural Indian cow ownership have been fleshed out […]
Part 2: The Observations made during original research on rural economic behaviour
One can roughly consider the relative income (or wealth) across three regions where observations were conducted on a continuum where the Indian village was the ‘wealthiest’ while the Malawians were living closest to the edge. However, on synthesizing the combined data collected across geographies, patterns of financial behaviour emerged that showed similarities of intention and […]
Exploratory User Research in the Rural Economy
When I first began developing the attributes by which to select representative user profiles for the original fieldwork to begin understanding the “prepaid economy”, that is, household financial management in rural India, The Philippines and Malawi, it was based on people’s ability to plan and budget. One can plan best when one is certain of […]
Beyond.internet
From the fact that mtandao is a newly minted word in Kiswahili that means network – from the verb tanda which means to spread – to the signboard’s assertion that its no longer simply a matter of getting access to the internet but instead a consideration of what’s next – our early survey of cyber […]
