you picked up on the fact that this post was directed specifically towards some of the less thorough approaches to customer interviews that are regularly practiced in industrial companies.

As far as the process of finding unmet and unarticulated needs we use an approach called the Customer Value Lens.

You need to approach the customer interview and or operations tour from an anthropological (or ethnographic) approach where you are trying to identify the parts of their operation that are dirty, dangerous, inconvenient, inefficient or otherwise problematic and ask questions to get to the bottom of what job they are trying to accomplish and what value would be created for them (higher sales, reduced working capital, or lower operating expenditures) if you could provide a solution. Some companies hire trained ethnographers to do this work, but I find that a cross functional team of technical, commercial and sometimes operations folks can usually do a darn good job of it.

Check out these posts for more: http://www.guidedinnovation.com/si/2010/01/13/wha… http://www.guidedinnovation.com/si/2010/03/22/max… http://www.guidedinnovation.com/si/2010/02/17/inn…