immerse me
taken from a comment i tired to leave on business week...
"I think they key point here is that it was bound to happen. Researchers are always on the hunt for new methods and smart tools to capture, analyze and incubate concepts and ideas harvested out of consumers.
There's a wave of change happening in the research space and many of us are taking cues from the web 2.0 scene, what flickr does with interestingness and clustering is not that different than what researchers are doing in analyzing ethnographic results.
I disagree that companies don't know what's going on. I feel firms do have a hint to what's wrong, what they lack is actionable process in discovering it, weeding it out, acting on change and making it happen - and then not forgetting.
Capture and analysis tools are fine and dandy. What's really missing in the research space is immersion. Design teams need to swim in the data, remember the big picture, think about the customer and make change.
Immersion is where we need to focus next."
IMMERSION BABY