Competitive Intelligence Academy

What is Competitive Intelligence?

“Competitive Intelligence is the activity of defining, collecting, analysing and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment; necessary to support tactical and strategic decision-making within an organisation.”

This definition, taken from Wikipedia, is one we particularly like as it highlights several key ideas. Firstly, it clarifies that Competitive Intelligence is more than simply gathering market information. It is about focusing the organisation’s interests, which means starting by defining what we want to know and identifying our initial priorities — what some authors call “critical intelligence factors”. These may include competitors, customers, technology, legislation or regulations.

What is the Intelligence Cycle in a company?

The Competitive Intelligence cycle includes several stages:

Defining what we want to know and which decisions we need to support. Competitive Intelligence always gathers information with the purpose of supporting decision-making. It makes no sense to accumulate information without analysis and without a defined purpose. The starting point must be the organisation’s need for information: to detect potential customers, decide on new international markets to enter, invest better in innovation, or become more resilient to new business models and regulatory changes. This can be supported by an Intelligence Directive.
Collecting information. This should be done with a Competitive Intelligence software solution, since the volume of information to be handled today far exceeds the capacity of manual processes or simple search alerts.
Analysing the information. Analysis adds value to the organisation: identifying opportunities and threats, and proposing possible actions to take, always based on our knowledge and experience.
Sharing the results with decision-makers. Once value has been added to the information, it must be shared with the rest of the team, including management. A software platform should enable not only the digitalisation of the process, but also the automation of workflows and value generation. The aim is to ensure that the effort invested in analysis has a tangible impact on decision-making.
Reassessing objectives and methods as part of continuous improvement. This requires metrics and a continuous improvement manual. Antara users benefit from comprehensive automated metrics and a detailed continuous improvement manual 🔒.

What is Technology Watch?

Technology Watch is a specific branch of Competitive Intelligence, focused on monitoring technological advances, scientific publications and patents, as well as the activities of key scientific and technological actors in a sector: universities, technology centres, startups and corporate R&D departments.

What is the Intelligence Function in a company?

The Intelligence Function is the organisational area responsible for establishing and leading the processes of the intelligence cycle: from setting objectives, collecting and analysing relevant information, through to distributing conclusions that support strategic decision-making.

Its role includes directing and coordinating the team involved, often made up of a heterogeneous, multidisciplinary group of professionals who dedicate part of their time to analysis and monitoring tasks.

Just like the Quality Department or Human Resources, the Intelligence Function is a horizontal service, designed to support the entire organisation and create value across all areas: innovation, marketing, operations, strategy and general management.

What are the benefits of Competitive Intelligence?

Competitive Intelligence is part of the broader discipline of Knowledge Management. From this perspective, it can contribute to an overall improvement of up to 25% in organisational productivity. Three of the main benefits of a competitive intelligence and technology watch system are:

Reducing costs. Digitalising the Intelligence Function lowers the costs of staying well-informed. However, the real cost reduction comes from minimising risks and increasing organisational resilience to change.
Boosting sales. Detecting potential customers is not the only benefit. Intelligence also helps anticipate risks such as stockouts or defaults, and continuously improves sales arguments.
Driving innovation. Competitive Intelligence and Technology Watch are the main sources of innovative ideas within the company, and are essential to achieving robust, market-focused innovation that keeps the organisation’s knowledge of the state of the art up to date.

Overall, Competitive Intelligence and Technology Watch provide a substantial improvement in decision-making at all levels: strategic, departmental, and even individual, helping each employee improve their performance.

Let’s take a look in the following paragraphs at what each of these steps involves.

Step 1. Promote the concept within your organisation

Often, those who initiate the project are the only ones who know what Competitive Intelligence is. Before starting, it is advisable to organise awareness sessions, internal talks or intranet content to explain what it is and the benefits it brings. Unlike areas such as Quality or Environment, the Intelligence Function is not something communicated externally, so it is essential to give it visibility internally so that all departments understand it and become involved. You can use the resources available in our Library and Blog.

Step 2. Obtain management support

As with any transversal project, backing from senior management is essential. CEOs usually expect four things from the Intelligence Function: that it supports decision-making with actionable information; that it incorporates the knowledge of the team in the analysis; that it strengthens the organisation’s resilience; and that it demonstrates return on investment. It is therefore recommended to prepare clear arguments and metrics showing how Intelligence will help address specific business challenges.

Step 3. Assess your starting point

Before implementation, it is necessary to map how the environment is currently being monitored in each department: what information is sought, what sources are used (even if basic, such as Google Alerts), and what tools are employed. This initial diagnosis, which can be captured in a spreadsheet with sources and responsibilities, is essential to define the scope of the project and justify the need for a more robust system. You also have access to our template for your Intelligence Directive.

Step 4. Choose the right software solution

The amount of information published daily makes it impossible to manage monitoring manually or only with free tools. It is therefore essential to select a market solution that filters out noise and enables collaborative analysis. It is not about reinventing a system from scratch, but about leveraging the knowledge embedded in proven platforms, adapted to the needs of innovative companies. In this Academy you will also find resources to help you evaluate your ideal solution.

Step 5. Recruit and train the Intelligence leadership team

Coordination of the Function is the responsibility of a leadership team, usually small, which needs specific training to operate the chosen solution and guide the rest of the organisation. This team is often heterogeneous and multidisciplinary, and does not require full-time dedication: even with dozens of analysts, coordination may only take a few hours per week. The important thing is that the team is empowered to define needs, assign responsibilities and measure results.

How much effort is required for coordination?

In the collaborative model of Competitive Intelligence promoted by Antara, very few companies designate a full-time coordinator. Even in organisations with dozens or hundreds of analysts, the leadership role is usually held part-time. Our experience shows that coordinating a team of 20–40 analysts requires less than two hours per week (around 5% of one person’s time). Of course, if the coordinator also works as an analyst, this time must be added.

Is one coordinator enough for the entire company?

In practice, it is rare for a single person to cover this role. Normally, there are at least two coordinators at the start, if only to provide backup and safeguard the initial investment. In larger deployments, there may be dozens of intelligence leaders, with at least a couple in each department or region. All of them should work under a single corporate coordinator who ensures proper training, resources and alignment with common guidelines.

Step 6. Launch the Competitive Intelligence pilot

The pilot is the first practical experience with the solution. It should not become a “political project” with token representatives from each area, but rather focus on one or two departments that are open to innovating in their processes, such as R&D, Innovation or Marketing. The more people from that area involved, the higher the quality of collaborative analysis and the greater the impact on real decisions. During the pilot, metrics are defined, processes tested, and best practices established to serve as a model for future expansion.

We recommend starting with a limited number of analysts (between 5 and 15, in addition to the leadership team) to gain practical experience before scaling to the entire organisation.

The pilot will require us to present the initiative to new analysts. It is usually necessary to carry out internal selling of the project, which means preparing explanatory material and presenting the objectives and steps to be taken to those involved. Antara also provides resources for this internal selling process in its User Academy 🔒.

It is highly advisable, when involving colleagues, to explain good practices in interpreting market signals or in creating intelligence reports.

The pilot aims to put into practice what was learnt during the administration training and to exercise the leadership we mentioned earlier. Let us focus on this goal, but for how long?

How much time should I dedicate to the pilot?

We will remain in the pilot stage until we feel comfortable with our coordination role and have learnt enough from our new relationship with the analysts and internal clients of the Intelligence Function. Depending on the capabilities of the chosen software solution and the quality of the training and support provided by the supplier, we will invest between a couple of weeks and three months.

During the pilot, we should especially practise methods of monitoring and continuous improvement of exploitation. We will select impact indicators or KPIs and put them to the test. This monitoring task will be much easier if you follow Antara’s manual🔒.

Step 7. Define the long-term plan

After the pilot, it is time to design the evolution of the Function. The plan should be agreed with senior management and key departments, covering how the Function will be managed (centralised or distributed), what additional resources will be needed, and which indicators will measure progress. This planning ensures the Intelligence Function does not remain a one-off initiative but becomes a sustainable strategic capability.

Step 8. Expand the pilot to the rest of the organisation

With the experience gained from the pilot and the long-term plan defined, the Function can now be scaled to the rest of the organisation. The key lies in maintaining a common management platform to avoid “knowledge silos” and to ensure that collaborative analysis generates synergies. At this stage, more departments are incorporated, the privacy model is refined, and external innovation partners may be added.

At this point, we will need to make decisions on several aspects, such as:

Whether to adopt a distributed or centralised system for administration services. The more distributed the leadership team is —for example, one Intelligence leader per department—, the greater the coordination effort required.
Whether to involve external innovation partners in Technology Watch. Should we invite our external R&D collaborators to participate in the Technology Watch of joint projects?
Whether to leverage Competitive Intelligence to provide value-added services to clients. Is it worthwhile to offer additional value to our customers with a relatively small extra effort?

In the “cruise phase” of your Intelligence Function, it will be crucial to focus on monitoring and continuous improvement. As with any system, predictive maintenance is always preferable: we must obtain statistics on the system’s use, easily identify areas for improvement, and act on them swiftly. Antara users have access to a continuous improvement manual 🔒 to support them in this task.

The Intelligence Function becomes a transversal practice, serving the whole organisation, just like Quality or Human Resources.

Step 1. Overcome the “build or buy” dilemma

With today’s information overload, digitalising the Intelligence Function is not optional. Once this is clear, there are three approaches:

Use multiple free tools (e.g. Google Alerts, RSS feeds, document systems). The problem: they are disparate, hard to integrate, require maintenance, and demand significant time commitment with steep learning curves.
Build your own system. This requires deep technical knowledge or costly outsourcing, plus ongoing updates. In practice, it is like reinventing the wheel at great expense.
Choose a proven commercial solution. These systems already incorporate the knowledge of many users, are tested, and evolve continuously with technology.

Step 2. Define your evaluation priorities

Identify which factors matter most to your organisation (e.g. integration with current systems, ease of use, support for collaboration). At Antara we put ourselves in your shoes, and to answer that question we developed a guide with input from the industry. In summary, the most important parameters for a company when evaluating market solutions and automating the Competitive Intelligence Function are:

Modelling the complexity of the business. This has been the most important priority in almost all responses. Every company’s business is inherently complex, and those responsible for Intelligence want to be able to express that complexity when defining the areas of focus for monitoring. If we cannot express our complexity, the effectiveness of any Intelligence solution will be greatly limited. This complexity is expressed differently by each department or business area. What matters to account managers, product managers, or R&D and product development teams is not the same. Moreover, these needs are interrelated.
Enabling the team to collaborate. The companies that participated in Antara’s study, along with CEOs who responded to a global survey (as you will see below), agree that it is essential to harness the knowledge and experience of people to correctly interpret what is happening in the market. This translates into the need for the software solution to facilitate the use of the team’s knowledge, especially within a model of Collaborative Competitive Intelligence.
… and eight other important parameters that you will find in the study.

Read the guide and adapt these criteria to your own particular case.

Step 3. Look for independent comparisons of software solutions

Industry reports and aggregated analyses can highlight strengths and weaknesses of different options. We have compiled a dozen comparisons carried out by the industry and consolidated them into a single report. We regularly ask companies for their opinions and comparisons of software solutions for Competitive Intelligence and Technology Watch. It does not matter to us whether they are Antara clients or users of other solutions, or whether they have evaluated several options and have not yet made a decision. From all of them we aggregate the feedback into a single analysis, which we are continuously updating for you.

Step 4. Create your own comparison according to your criteria

Use evaluation templates to score features based on your specific needs. To support your work, we have developed an Excel template that incorporates the criteria generated in the study. Use it to create your own comparative report.

Step 5. Test and choose the software solution

Run pilots, compare results, and select the platform that best supports your Intelligence Function. The “test” and “choose” phases are closely connected. In some cases, demos and references may be enough to make a decision without additional testing. Otherwise, a test can be carried out after the jury has provisionally selected the preferred solution, or even with two or three finalists. It is important to involve potential users in this stage, whether or not they are part of the jury, and to keep the evaluation criteria and templates updated throughout the process.

Once the best solution has been chosen, the decision should either be confirmed or reviewed if doubts remain. A full restart is not usually necessary, as the information gathered can support an alternative decision. If the choice is clear, the next step is to design and launch an action plan in collaboration with the supplier, who can provide valuable expertise in implementation.

If you want to learn more about these final steps, read this blog post that specifically addresses the topic.

Antara Academy: Competitive Intelligence, Technology Watch and Business Strategy

In this Academy: