The rise of ethnography at Intel
The company at the heart of the machine is trying harder to get into the heads of its users. In the latest MRWho, MrWeb’s Michael Kenyon talked to Ken Anderson, Manager of People and Practice Research at Intel and one of the company’s small but growing band of ethnographers.
Intel currently employs the largest number of ethnographers of any company in the world.
Anderson, who joined Intel in 2001, argues that “you need an ethnographer to cover both sides – the outside populations and the company itself. If you do a really excellent study but present the results in a way that doesn’t match the company’s culture, it’s not going anywhere. A lot of innovation dies because people can’t articulate it in a way that makes sense. […] Our job is as much about understanding translation as understanding people.”
