Tomoko Ichikawa was raised in Asia, Argentina, and Los Angeles. Though she now lives in Chicago, she visits Japan every year, keeps up with the daily news there via the Internet, and uses an online service to communicate with her parents in Tokyo in Japanese. Writing in Spanish, she stays in touch with high school teachers and classmates in Argentina by e-mail. For lunch at work, she might bring a turkey sandwich—or a bento box.

Her background, while extreme, is emblematic of what is happening to the world’s cultures and carries enormous implications for businesses that want to migrate products, services, and brands from one culture to another.

In yesterday’s one-size-fits-all world, a company could often migrate something that was a hit in the U.S. or Europe by tweaking its language and advertising and funneling a lot of money into local marketing efforts. Germany’s Mercedes-Benz (www.mercedes-benz.com), for example, traded on its reputation for building highly engineered automobiles to drive into markets the world over. Japan’s Sony Corp. (www.sony.com) found that its knack for building compact, economical, and reliable electronics, such as the Walkman, struck a chord around the globe. Coca-Cola Co. (www.coke.com) and Philip Morris’s Marlboro cigarettes (www.philipmorris.com) traded on their "American-ness" to create large foreign followings.

Today, however, the globalization of business compresses geography and blurs the lines that traditionally separated cultures. With cultures blending, the tastes, desires, and spending habits of people like Ichikawa have become much harder to predict.

To figure out what will sell in a culture, companies should consider establishing a sort of living laboratory where they can study intimately how people live, how they incorporate tools into their daily routines, and what they need to have to create a better life at home and at work.

Our experience in Hong Kong is illustrative.

Because Hong Kong can no longer support itself by merely providing low-cost labor to build products conceived in Europe and the U.S., the Hong Kong government and several major companies have launched a 10-year initiative to develop higher-technology capabilities in manufacturing. Several of the partners also decided to track people’s daily lives—partly taking advantage of Hong Kong’s extensive fiber-optic network—to develop, launch, and, in a perfect world, export products and services.

When we got involved, we spent six weeks observing several families as they readied the kids for school, went to work, shopped, helped their children with homework, and went about the rest of their daily business. We used several observational methods, including day-in-the-life tracking that involved making maps and taking our own photographs of our subjects’ interactions with family members, products, other people, information, and services. We used video ethnography, which identifies detailed patterns of daily life that would not necessarily be noticed in real-time observation. We had the subjects take thousands of photographs with digital cameras, and we conducted follow-up interviews.

Our sponsors were certain that technology would create business opportunities in the home in entertainment, security, and control. Early on, we confirmed that those opportunities existed but also discovered six others: storage; balancing the budget; keeping the place clean and well-maintained; staying in touch with family members; helping sons and daughters in their studies; and buying fresh food.

In the process, we observed five values. People wanted to: foster continuous contact among family members; save time; nurture family values; tie into the pride felt by Hong Kong’s people as they rejoined mainland China; and extend children’s educational efforts. The first two probably are important in any modern culture. The last three, however, struck us as being unique to Hong Kong and could provide fertile ground for new products and services:

We had observed that family values and the desire for continuous contact faced challenges. Now that 50% of Hong Kong’s women work full-time, the tradition of caring for elderly parents has come under such severe strain that grandparents are beginning to move into their own apartments. To deal with the change, many family members now carry a second cellphone used only for intrafamily communication, and they prepare handwritten schedules that detail who will care when for grandparents living on their own.

We proposed Homebase, a system that would incorporate a small, flat screen inside a case resembling a picture frame. The screen would provide a data link to a relative’s home and update what a camera saw inside that household every two minutes. The screen also could track the reading from health sensors the relative could wear.

We saw that, because Hong Kong has a poor public education system, parents spend a lot on supplemental education materials and devote countless hours to teaching their children in the evening. In one home, we saw a mother prepare daily lessons for her son and then post them on the apartment’s living room walls so they were always visible.

We proposed three related technology products. Thinktank would connect schools, teachers, and parents, who could get information about the child’s work at school. TeacherLINK would connect teachers to parents seeking advice. LogBook would link office-bound parents to children working on lessons at home. Thinktank and TeacherLINK would be designed into a foldaway table to save space in cramped apartments, which are the norm in Hong Kong.

We learned that, regardless of income, half of Hong Kong’s families shop for food daily at a "wet" market, where they can buy live fish and chickens. But in a hurried-up world, mothers no longer have the time to shop twice a day, as they had for generations. The norm has become to shop once toward the end of the day, which jams stores and streets.

We suggested Foodchain, which would promote shopping at any time. Fish and chickens would wear bar-coded tags so that customers could pick certain ones, then specify when Foodchain employees should kill them, how they should be prepared, and where they should be delivered.

To export an innovation, a company can start by making a few educated guesses. For example, Foodchain might work in France and other cultures with a passion for fresh food. Thinktank might translate in Japan, where parents concerned about the public school system also take extreme interest in educating their children. But it takes more than a gut feeling or a hunch to succeed across borders. It takes in-the-trenches digging in each new market. As that American cultural icon Yogi Berra once said, you can observe a lot by watching.

Whitney is director and Steelcase/Robert C. Pew professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design. His work focuses on new methods of understanding people and planning communications and products. He can be reached at whitney@id.iit.edu.