Creating Competitive Advantages in a Complex Future is the theme of IntelliSummit 2019
January 9, 2019
Comintelli Celebrates its 20th Anniversary!
January 30, 2019
What is Competitive Intelligence?
Competitive Intelligence is all about gathering, analyzing and managing market information with the purpose to maximize the own company’s competitive advantage. Put another way, Competitive Intelligence is the process of enhancing marketplace competitiveness through a greater understanding of a firm’s competitive environment. For e.g. customers, competitors, products, markets, technologies and trends.
Why is it so important?
We live in the “age of intelligence”, where an accelerating pace of change and an exponential growth of data has increased competition for everyone in the marketplace. In order to survive in this competitive environment, you need to keep up with – or even better – stay ahead of – your competitors.
To do this, you need Competitive Intelligence (CI). CI is needed to understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and to anticipate their next move, but also to analyze customers and regulators and to discover new trends in the market.
Why do you need a Competitive Intelligence software?
A fast-paced environment also demands fast business decisions, so organizations need to make sure that their employees have access to the right information at the right time. They must also improve their business productivity through internal collaboration and information sharing.
Unfortunately, many organizations struggle with this as both information and knowledge tend to be stored in separate silos that are hard to access and rarely shared. Often it is hard to even know what already exists.
As a result, a lot of precious time is spent on searching, important information is easily overlooked, and there’s a lot of duplication of work. Having a Competitive Intelligence system in place will solve this issue.
- More than 30% of an average knowledge worker´s day is spent searching for and consolidating information across a variety of data sources. These knowledge workers only find the information they need 56% of the time.*
- 72% of U.S. knowledge workers strongly agree that they would be more productive if they didn’t have to switch back and forth between applications to get their work done.**
- 73% report that search engines give them access to huge amounts of information, but don’t help them prioritize their work.**
* “Unlocking the Hidden Value of Information”, IDC, 2014
** Lexis Nexis, 2012
A best-in-class Competitive Intelligence software will automatically gather information from both your internal and external sources and unify them into one single portal, so you don’t have to move from one information source to another. Basically, making it a one-stop access point for all your market intelligence! This makes it fast and easy to find and share relevant information, so you can spend your time analyzing it and gaining insights, rather than searching for it.
A best-in-class Competitive Intelligence software will also add context and meaning to large amounts of unstructured data and discover trends and patterns in this data.
Well, the list goes on. But used in the right way, you’ll experience benefits such as:
- Time and money savings (shorter time-to-insight)
- Improved strategic decision making
- Increased internal efficiency by reducing duplication of efforts
- Increased innovation
The question is, can you afford to miss out?
Sign up for a free trial of Intelligence2day, the Insight Engine for Market- and Competitive, to see how you can improve your own intelligence work by using a software that supports all phases of the intelligence cycle!
For more information on Competitive Intelligence, you can download a free copy of the White Paper “An Introduction to Competitive Intelligence” here!
