All credible notions of the New Product Development (NPD) process stress the importance of forming, early on, an understanding the people who will use products, how they will use them and the context in which usage is most likely to occur.
This absolutely requires real-world observation of real people on their own turf, doing whatever it is that they do. This real-world observation as part of New Product Development is often called "Ethnography", a term borrowed from several other fields, especially Anthropology.
Is Ethnography the "new core competency", as claimed by a fairly recent article in Business Week (www.businessweek.com)? We think YES.
