How can you gather competitive intelligence to drive business innovation?

1 Define your CI goals and scope

Before you start gathering CI, it is essential to have a clear understanding of your objectives and how you plan to use the information. Define your CI goals and scope based on your business objectives, innovation focus, and competitive environment. For instance, you may want to use CI to gain insight into your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, benchmark your performance and identify gaps for improvement, discover customer needs and preferences, explore emerging trends and technologies, or validate or refine your value proposition and business model.

2 Identify your CI sources and methods

There are many sources and methods you can use to gather CI, depending on your goals and scope. You can categorize them into primary and secondary sources, and qualitative and quantitative methods. Primary sources are those that you obtain directly from your competitors, customers, or market, such as interviews, surveys, observations, or experiments. Secondary sources are those that you access indirectly from published or public data, such as reports, articles, reviews, or social media. Qualitative methods are those that involve collecting and analyzing non-numerical data, such as opinions, feedback, or insights. Quantitative methods are those that involve collecting and analyzing numerical data, such as statistics, metrics, or ratings.

3 Choose your CI tools and techniques

Gathering and analyzing CI effectively and efficiently requires the use of tools and techniques that are appropriate to your sources and methods. There is a wide range of tools and techniques available, from simple and free to complex and paid. For instance, search engines, databases, and directories can be used to find relevant information online. Newsletters, alerts, and RSS feeds can be used to monitor updates and changes. Social media platforms, forums, and blogs can be used to listen to conversations and sentiments. Web analytics, SEO, and SEM tools can measure traffic, ranking, and keywords. Surveys, polls, and quizzes can collect feedback and opinions. Interviews, focus groups, and ethnography can provide insights and understanding. Mystery shopping, product testing, and reverse engineering can evaluate features and quality. SWOT, PESTLE, Porter's Five Forces analysis can be used to analyze external factors and forces. VRIO analysis, value chain analysis, and core competency analysis are useful for analyzing internal resources and capabilities.

4 Organize and store your CI data

Gathering CI requires organization and storage of data in a way that facilitates access, sharing, and updating. You may consider using a system to categorize, filter, and search your data according to your goals and scope. Additionally, preserving the quality and accuracy of your data is important, so you should use a format that supports this. Spreadsheets, databases, and CRM systems can be used to store and manage structured data; documents, presentations, and reports can be used to store and present unstructured data; dashboards, charts, and graphs can be used to visualize and summarize data; finally, cloud storage, collaboration platforms, and intranets can be used to store and share data online.

5 Analyze and interpret your CI data

Once you have organized and stored your data, you need to analyze and interpret it to extract meaningful insights and implications for your business and innovation. Using a framework can help you compare your data with competitors, customers, and the market, identify patterns, trends, gaps, and outliers in your data, evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your data, draw conclusions and recommendations from your data, as well as communicate and report your findings to stakeholders.

6 Apply and integrate your CI insights

The final step of gathering CI is to apply and integrate your insights into your innovation strategy and process. You should use your insights to validate or challenge your assumptions and hypotheses, generate or refine ideas and solutions, test and iterate prototypes and products, launch and scale innovations in the market, and monitor and measure innovation outcomes and impact.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?