What is Requirements Elicitation?
Elicitation is actively drawing requirements out of stakeholders and sources — interviews, workshops, observation, document analysis, prototypes — rather than "gathering" them, a verb that implies requirements lie around fully formed. They don't: people know their pain fluently and their requirements poorly.
Observation is the underrated technique: what people do reliably contradicts what they say they do, and the gap is where the real requirements hide.
Worked example
Warehouse staff interviewed about a new scanning system describe their process cleanly. A morning of observation shows every picker keeping a paper cheat-sheet of "problem SKUs" the current system mislabels — a workaround nobody mentioned because it had become furniture. That cheat-sheet becomes the highest-value requirement in the document, found by watching, not asking.