Empirical Research

How Ethnography Helps Startups to Understand Users

Ethnographic field study

The first part of this series gave an overview how qualitative data and customer development go hand in hand. There are different methods to gather qualitative data. In most books and articles about customer development, the authors (implicitly) describe the method of conducting semi-structured interviews – as I did in the first part of this series. Another possibility to gain qualitative data is through ethnography. Ethnography is not merely an additional option. It is considered to be the hour of birth of qualitative research. Originally stemming from anthropology, Conklin (1968: 172) defined ethnography nearly a decade ago as:

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Empirical Research

Why and how customer development & qualitative data go hand in hand

customer development interview lego

You probably know the importance of early customer development if you’re acquainted with entrepreneurship and startup blogs. If not, read customer development by Ash Maurya. I’ll wait. Often early customer development is summarized with the expression “get out of the building” which is popularized amongst others by Steve Blank. The idea is to gather data – qualitative data – about customer problems and potential solutions.

Qualitative data is about describing something whereas quantitative data is about measuring or counting information (i.e., quantifying). There’s already tons of great material how and what to ask your potential customers. So, I won’t start from scratch. I want to refine what is already out there with asking methods used in academic research. This will help enhance your understanding of what your customers want – the best starting point for building a great product.

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Practical Examples

Crowducate – My Journey for an Opportunity

Crowducate Entrepreneurship Opportunity

In the last blog post we talked about discovery vs. creation of opportunities. As I promised in my first blog post, I’m going to use my own entrepreneurial journey as an example or my own entrepreneurial journeys as examples for the academic concepts, which I’ve introduced here. So you might one to read the previous post before you continue. So let’s have a look at the open education platform Crowducate. Btw, for the tech-savvy: Manuel Schoebel (@DerMambo) gives you a great introduction to how we developed the prototype of Crowducate.

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Theory

What is the Field of Entrepreneurship all about?

Research Field Entrepreneurship Opportunity

I’m glad you asked. This simple question has sparked many discussions for decades. Should entrepreneurship be a discipline of its own? Is it only about new ventures? If yes, would that mean that larger organizations couldn’t be entrepreneurial? And if larger organization can be entrepreneurial, why should entrepreneurship be a discipline of its own? If that is the case, then entrepreneurship should be a part of strategy management or organizations science. After decades of discussions, Shane and Venkataraman (2000: p. 218) suggest the following definition, which in the meantime has become highly influential, for the scholarly field:

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