Competitive Intelligence
Innovate Faster than your Competitors
If you want your company to become more agile, start by rethinking your use of competitive intelligence. Focus on building a strategic early warning capability so you don’t miss the big picture.
The rapid changes in the business environment have been viewed as a central problem of organization. This environment includes a rapidly changing landscape where new competitors are entering the marketplace, and current competitors are offering new products. In order to be effective and proactive, organizations must respond to the opportunities, challenges, risks and limitations posed by today’s environment.
What is Competitive Intelligence?
Competitive intelligence may be regarded as the continuous acquisition and use of information about competitors, new competitors, customers, suppliers, and competing industries in order to support decision making processes for enhancing the overall competitiveness of the organization. It is a strategic management tool and should therefore be situated as close as possible to decision makers and not in a lower level department.
Competitive intelligence tells managers what they need to know about current and future competition, including:
- Their own organization’s strengths and weaknesses
- Financials
- Major clients
- Detailed inspection of existing products
- New technologies (particularly disruptive technologies) on the horizon
- How competitors responded to your previous initiatives
- Competitor strengths and weaknesses
Benefits of Competitive Intelligence
Some of the strategic beneifits of an organized system of competitive intelligence include:
- Discovering new potential competitors or customers and supporting starting of new lines of business
- Identifying and analyzing new technologies, products and processes that influence the organization’s activities
- Identifying and analyzing political or legislative standards or regulations that influence the organization’s activities
- Identifying and analyzing situations, from competitors, customers, suppliers or other, that evolved into successes or into failures.
Build your Competitive Advantage
The competitive advantage is born as soon as a firm discovers a new or a more efficient way to come into the industry and put the discovery into a working form, before its competitors. Identifying the source of innovation is equivalent to describing the roadmap to create a competitive advantage. Competitive intelligence supports a competitive advantage and better organizational performance by encouraging better business planning, new product introduction success and new market development.
