Understanding the Innovator’s Dilemma
Understanding the Innovator’s Dilemma – Play.
The “Competitive Intel” Episode 26 Transcript – Benchmarking and Competitive Intelligence
Effective positioning within a market segment requires an understanding of the relative strengths and weaknesses of your company and its offerings against the competition. While benchmarking is a key capability to fulfill that goal, common misunderstandings about the goals and practices around benchmarking can limit success, even by skilled competitive intelligence organizations. Refining the Definition ...
Competitive Intelligence and Competitor Pricing Part 3
Three Ways Pricing’s Not as Secret as You Think As you conduct competitive intelligence research and analysis to discover the pricing structures used by your competitors, it’s important to bear in mind that this information is not a collection of trade secrets. That perspective can provide valuable insights: Don’t overlook open source intelligence. It is ...
Competitive Intelligence and Competitor Pricing Part 2
Three Reasons to Bring on the Humans! Relationships between vendors, distributors, and customers can become long-term and complex in the B2B sphere. The large amounts of money involved make investments in time and energy worthwhile for all concerned, and price lists alone may not capture all factors that are relevant to the transaction: Vendor incentives ...
Modern Data for Trusted Frameworks – SCIP Chapter Event – NJ / CT
As presented on 03/10/2013. Download the presentation here.
The “Competitive Intel” Episode 25 Transcript – Critical Thinking Tools and Tips
Weighted Ranking Analysis for Competitive Intelligence A substantial portion of competitive intelligence practice is applying structured methodologies to decision making, both to improve the quality of decisions and to build consensus around those decisions. As introduced in The Thinker’s Toolkit, by Morgan D. Jones, weighted ranking is a powerful set of critical thinking tools that ...
Competitive Intelligence and Competitor Pricing Part 1
Three Varieties of Smoke & Mirrors in B2B Pricing The amounts of money involved in a typical B2B sale are typically far larger than those for a consumer product or service—often in the range of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars—which sets the stage for far greater variability. While that reality makes B2B pricing ...
Competitive Intelligence from the Technology Adoption Lifecycle Stage 5
Three Insights about Laggards: The Last to the Party After a product or technology has been widely available and deployed for some time, there will always be some portion of the market that has held back from adopting it. The so-called Laggards, which typically comprise about 15% of the market, focus entirely on commodity technologies ...
Competitive Intelligence from the Technology Adoption Lifecycle Stage 4
Three Insights about the Late Majority: Reluctant to Be Led A large portion of the entire market—perhaps 35%—makes up the Late Majority group of customers (also known as Conservatives), which tend to see technology as a burden to be kept up with, rather than as an empowering engine of change. For this group, the driving ...
Big Data Prospecting: Staking a Claim
Buried in petabytes of data, it can seem a daunting task to retrieve the information crucial to your competitive intelligence work. The good news is, the tools you need to sift out these nuggets are already at your fingertips, and the kinds of key intelligence questions that can be answered from public Big Data repositories ...
Competitive Intelligence from the Technology Adoption Lifecycle Stage 3
Three Insights about the Early Majority: Is It Safe Yet? Moving a new product into the mainstream requires you to reduce the perceived risk associated with it by potential customers. The so-called Early Majority (also known as Pragmatists), representing about 35% of the entire market, represents the first stage of mainstream adoption. This risk-averse group ...
15 Minute Series – Finding your Competitor’s Customers
15 Minute Series – Finding your Competitor’s Customers – Play.
Competitive Intelligence from the Technology Adoption Lifecycle Stage 2
Three Insights about Early Adopters: The Search for Business Value As a product becomes feature complete, it may be regarded as “ready for prime time,” even if it is not yet a candidate for mainstream adoption. If such a product or technology offers the potential for breakthrough business value, it may get the attention of ...
Competitive Intelligence from the Technology Adoption Lifecycle Stage 1
Three Insights about Innovators: The Bleeding Edge As described in Crossing the Chasm, even before a product or technology is widely available, it often has a small but dedicated customer base that might consist of 2-3% of the total market, known as the Innovators. These alpha testers and related customers don’t insist on a solution ...
The “Competitive Intel” Episode 24 Transcript – HUMINT in Context: Key Questions to Consider
Competitive intelligence gathering typically requires going beyond online sources, to interviewing human subjects. Even if it’s well within your comfort zone to contact and get information from a group of strangers, the guidelines discussed here can make the process smoother and more successful. Contacting Human Intelligence Subjects To initiate the process of gathering human intelligence, ...
Tip #3 on Gathering Competitive Intelligence on Private Companies: Use Specialized Tools to Dig Deeper
Tracking the history of a company’s web site can illuminate a great deal about how the company has developed. Archive.org (the Wayback Machine) captures snapshots of web sites along an historical timeline, so you can see what a given web site looked like at a certain date. By considering a series of snapshots, you can ...
Disruptive Innovation as a Competitive Intelligence Framework Part 3
Three Habits of Highly Disruptive Competitors When a competitive intelligence organization gauges the potential impact of a disruptive innovation, the culture and related factors at the companies responsible for the innovation are an important source of insight. The following series of questions can help illuminate the likelihood that a specific competitor is a disruptive rather ...
Disruptive Innovation as a Competitive Intelligence Framework Part 2
Three Reasons an Innovation Might Not Move Mountains Just as important as recognizing a disruptive innovation, you also need to be able to identify those innovations that are merely sustaining, meaning that they represent incremental shifts that are not likely to create deep-seated changes in an industry. Affirmative answers to the following questions can help ...
The “Competitive Intel” Episode 23 Transcript – eBooks you should know in 2013
On planes, trains, and bedside tables, good business books are filled with the opportunities that flow from fresh insights. We make it a habit to read as many of them as we can, and we make recommendations at classes, conferences, and just about everywhere we go. This article builds on a previous one on we ...
Disruptive Innovation as a Competitive Intelligence Framework Part 1
Three Ways to Predict When Your World is About to Change It can seem like everywhere you look, someone is proclaiming that the latest buzzword will redefine the fabric of the universe. While cutting through the noise to identify truly disruptive innovations can be difficult, it’s an important task for competitive intelligence organizations. Affirmative answers ...
Human Sources for Competitive Intelligence Part 3
A Three-Part Framework for Culling the Herd to Find the Right Humans To add to the positive results of deeper human intelligence in your analyses, you will want to identify additional people to interview. Open source intelligence (Web searching) is a good place to start, which will lead to an expanding set of possibilities, such ...
Human Sources for Competitive Intelligence Part 2
Three Ways to Break the Silence and Get the Ball Rolling Once an organization has recognized the value of human sources to the overall competitive intelligence effort, there can still be some question about what first steps to take, especially if human intelligence sources haven’t played a large role in past projects. The following possibilities ...
Human Sources for Competitive Intelligence Part 1
Three Insights from People Needing (Intelligent) People To understand everything you need to know about an industry, there’s just no substitute for directly talking to people. Because of that reality, human intelligence should ideally be part of every competitive intelligence project, no matter what the eventual goal of the effort is, and no matter what ...
No Cloaks, No Daggers in Competitive Intelligence Part 3: Three Ways the Journalist Vanquished the Spy
One key difference between being a spy and a competitive intelligence practitioner is that the intelligence community may use force (in the case of interrogation) or deception (in the case of elicitation) in gathering human intelligence. In contrast, a competitive intelligence practitioner relies on interviewing techniques, which can be well informed by the approaches taken ...
Understanding the Growth Share Matrix
Understanding the Growth Share Matrix – Play.
No Cloaks,No Daggers in Competitive Intelligence Part 2: Three Tales from the Market Researcher and the Spy
Unlike spycraft, competitive intelligence must operate within the ethical and practical confines of the business community. There is no room for the force or deception that can play a role in the operations of the international intelligence community. Rather, competitive intelligence draws from fields such as market research for its techniques and approaches: Soundness and ...
No Cloaks, No Daggers in Competitive Intelligence Part 1: Three Spycraft Approaches and How They Apply to CI
It’s common to compare the competitive intelligence (CI) field with spying. In reality, the two are very different; the intrigue and romance afforded the international man or woman of mystery have little to do with the approaches and techniques that are common in the competitive intelligence field. The key differences are apparent in considering three ...
Twitter’s Game Board – Co-opetition
Twitter has been receiving a good deal of flack from it’s ecosystem partners. Ecosystem partners have even launched an online petition to help force the issue to appear in front of more users and other ecosystem players. While a lot can be said about the recent moves it is illustrative to analyze them using a ...
Product Camp 2013 – Chicago and Vancouver
If you’re in Chicago or Vancouver BC on Feb 2nd, and you’re involved in product development, think about dropping in for the free Product Camps happening on that day. Vancouver Product Camp 2013 Chicago Product Camp 2013 And if you want to do us a solid, please up-vote our sessions: Vancouver: Going Beyond Google Vancouver: ...
Best Competitive Intelligence Books Part 3: Three Kinds of Patterns that Save the Day
Deducing patterns in the world around us is the key to learning from the past, understanding the present, and preparing for the future. The books listed here show how to build on the successes of those who came before you, avoid their mistakes, and receive guidance from the wisdom of crowds: Lords of Strategy: (W ...
Going Beyond Google: Gathering Internet Intelligence – now in it’s 4th edition…
While there are many wonderful things you can say about eBooks, one of the best is how easy it is to self-publish and the benefits that accrue from doing so. One of the biggest benefits is how rapidly you can can update content that you own. To illustrate this with a few publication dates here is the ...
The “Competitive Intel” Episode 22 Transcript – Are You a Spy?
Journalists, analysts, market researchers – how often do you hear these people referred to as spies? And yet, for the competitive intelligence professional, it’s all too common to hear, “Oh, so you’re a spy!” While CI certainly draws some techniques from the intelligence community, deep and clear differences exist, with regard to both ethics and ...
The “Competitive Intel” Episode 21 Transcript – The Fiscal Cliff and Competitive Intelligence
Every organization presents moments of opportunity that watchful competitors can take advantage of. For example, during the end-of-year holiday season, operations at most companies in the US and many other parts of the world are virtually at a standstill. That near-hibernation may last four to six weeks or more, and it’s just one of many ...
The Other “Fiscal Cliff” – How to Stick It to the Competition
I’ll start by saying that we don’t believe the goal of CI, or business, is to destroy the competition but, rather, to delight customers. Business isn’t war: War is about destroying value; business is about creating value. And it helps to have deep knowledge of the market and the competition to do that. CI helps ...
Competitive Intelligence and Co-opetition Part 3: Five Ways to Ask Where This Relationship is Going
In business, as in love, relationships that were once the pinnacle of joy can fall apart, leaving you to ask, “where did it go wrong?” Competitive intelligence provides tools that help you analyze the state of the relationship between two companies that complement one another, such as when an external company sells services that help ...
Competitive Intelligence and Co-opetition Part 2: Four Perils When Complements Go Bad
The position of your company in the market often benefits from the broader ecosystem. For example, we have written elsewhere about the complementary benefits between Apple TV and NetFlix—Apple TV gets access to streaming NetFlix content, and NetFlix potentially gets additional subscribers to its service. Those complementary relationships may be mutually beneficial for the long ...