She was watching vendors display their wares to discerning customers and praise their value and durability. But it was the customers' ability to read intricate origination codes on the merchandise that was the surprise.

"They'd flip the cell phone over, take the battery out and actually read the bar code on it to see where the phone was built," Canavan says.

She and two colleagues were doing fieldwork for their employer, Motorola, investigating how the company could best enter the emerging markets of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.