Monitoring changing customer needs and requirements, along with shortening product development cycle times, are major concerns for manufacturing companies. Factors which influence these concerns are determined often at the front end of New Product Development (NPD). Approaches to requirements capture were investigated from telecommunications, automotive and IT industries. It was found that the automotive company used market research agencies as an ongoing input into the NPD process, while the computing company was attempting to introduce a cross-disciplinary approach to both idea capture and requirements capture.