Check out a great article by Risa Sacks, a fellow AIIP member and phone researcher extraordinaire. I've frequently turned to phone research (especially when doing government or industry research), and generally have had good luck, once I've connected to the right person.

Read the article at: http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/oct08/Sacks.shtml. 

What tools / techniques do researchers use when conducting "environmental scanning" projects? While the general reading and scanning of resources on the web and print help; I've also found services like Scopus can be of great value when looking for trends in scholarly literature ... some concepts and new ideas will be published in these journals before they're ever seen in everyday life. I've made extensive use of Scopus's ability to do link analysis. One of my favorite techniques is to find articles we liked from 5 - 10 years back, look up the articles on Scopus, then check the citation records to see who cited the original article and what the original authors have published since. In some cases, I'll find completely new concepts to research that cite the orignial articles. 

Of course one can also subscribe to specialized mailing lists to listen in to subject specialists ... occassionally you'll find news/developments months before they break in the traditional media.  

Just read Environmental Scanning: A Different Kind of Competency by Lauren Albert in Information Outlook (SLA's journal). The article discusses how to "look for the unexpected" ... having done this for many clients over the years, I was a bit surprised to find that it now has an official designation.