Global Innovation Research

Recently we were interviewed for two different global studies on global innovation. Both the German Research Foundation or Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Danish Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs and Centre for Economic and Business Research or FORA separately came through the Bay Area as part of as study of leading innovation/design entities in the US and around the world.

Both groups offered to share their results with me and so I’ll post more specifics here when I’ve got ’em. Meanwhile, it was fun to be interviewed instead of doing the interviewing, even if it was clearly a conversational, expert-interview type of thing, and not an ethnography (neither did a huge amount of following-up or probing, it was pretty much based on what I had to say). One interesting technique, though: the group from FORA asked me to reiterate some of my key points from our longer interview (recorded on audio) for a 5-minute summary video. They went over with each other, and with me, what points seemed the most salient, and then reinterviewed me into the video camera. The point was not to get more information, but simply to create an effective deliverable. I was not at all uncomfortable with it, indeed I felt very listened to in having a precis of my interview created on-the-fly. It reminded me that being able to communicate what is learned from the field is crucial; that methods could be innovated around the effective communication as much as the effective discovery.

Series

About Steve