NEXT 2019 Pre-Conference Series - Ellen Kolstø - IBM Q

Happy Market Research Podcast

The 2019 NEXT pre-conference series is giving listeners an inside look into companies such as IBM, Voice Metrics, Ipsos, and Pulse Labs.. Join insight leaders on June 13 – 14 in Chicago for NEXT, where you can discover how technology and innovation are changing the market research industry. In this episode, Jamin Brazil interviews Ellen Kolstø, Design Principal at IBM Q.

Find Ellen Online:

LinkedIn

Website: www.ibm.com/us-en

[00:01]

Hi, I'm Jamie Brazil, and you're listening to the Happy Market Research podcast. My guest today is Ellen Kolstø, Design Principle at IBM Q. International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM, is an American multinational information technology company that is headquartered in New York, with operations in over 170 countries. In 2016, IBM launched the IBM Q Experience, which is an online platform that gives the general public access to a set of IBM's cloud based quantum computing. Ellen has hosted lectures at the University of Texas on design for artificial intelligence and has served in senior roles on both the agency and services side for companies including JWT, Young & Rubicam, Leo Burnett and BrainJuicer. Ellen, thanks for being on the Happy Market Research podcast today!

[00:49]

Happy to be here! Thank you.

[00:51]

Tell me a little bit about your background. This is kind of helpful for us because it level sets, and gives us a little bit of context of who you are.

[01:02]

Yeah, always a great question. So I started life in the agency environment as a strategic planner and so it came up through that world of account planning. I'd like to say it came over from the Mayflower, sometime in the 80s, from the British, and I grew up in that culture where it was very much about understanding customers and working with them and doing the research yourself so that you could translate that into creative strategy for communications. So I started in that world, and did that for quite a while. Then I felt that over time, the balance of the amount of research that was getting conducted shifted over to clients themselves, and they were taking on more of that in their own realms, and agencies were doing a little bit less of that. And so I found it very attractive to move into the realm of market research, where I could spend all my time conducting research, which is my favorite thing. And that is when I moved into that world and into BrainJuicer, now known as System1. I liked that environment as well because we did a lot of really innovative types of research using technology, so it combined these two worlds that I've been playing in, especially most recently. We did a lot of online ethnography and also online community. So you had a lot of tools to use and have consumers come with you for weeks and months in some cases as they work through different experiences with you, so that you could maximize products. And it was really fun, whether it was a long-term engagement, working with them on their relationship to cookies and unboxing experiences or how they selected their phone service and all that kind of fun that went along with that. So I did that for a few years, and then, I had this interesting opportunity where someone said: “Hey, IBM is looking for people with deeper search experience in what we call ‘user research and technology’”. Looking for that for Watson, specifically in the realm of AI, specifically they built up that team because Watson was new three years ago, it was just getting started, especially with the design team, and that is the group that creates the user interface and all of the tooling that our customers use to create AI themselves. I decided to go talk to them, and it was a really great experience. And I ended up there in a completely different realm: total technology, business to business, enterprise environment, but in a completely new and exciting space. And I was very energized by that. And that is how I ended up making my way to IBM throug...