At the Antara Academy for Competitive Intelligence, we explain the basic concepts and offer you ideas to implement the Competitive Intelligence Function in your company.
(If you are already an Antara user, also take advantage of the specific resources for you in the Users Academy 🔒)
Table of Contents
What is Competitive Intelligence and what advantages does it have
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How to choose the most suitable solution for my company
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How to successfully implement the Intelligence Function in the company
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What is Competitive Intelligence and what advantages does it have
What is Competitive Intelligence
What "is not" Competitive Intelligence
Around the concept of Competitive Intelligence, we can find many other related concepts, some of which are used as synonyms -not being so-, and others directly confuse the objective and the technology used. For example, we should not confuse Competitive Intelligence with Technology Watch. Technology Watch is solely concerned with monitoring technology, although it has a multitude of perspectives that we can combine with that focus: competitors, patents, scientific articles, new technology start-ups ...
Another example is Business Intelligence, which was the name given by the large consulting firms to the processing of quantitative data, already structured in a database, and to its representation in a way that helps us establish correlations and make decisions. But Competitive Intelligence also manages qualitative information and involves analysis and causal inference: interpreting why something happens or is likely to happen with a certain probability, and discussing what actions we should take.
By the way, there are dangers in establishing correlations from data. We explain the issue in this article: North by Northwest: Big Data epidemic and analysis mortality.
Finally, we must bear in mind that Competitive Intelligence is definitely not espionage, and must be conducted within not only legal but also ethical boundaries. At some point, you will come across some grey areas in the ethics of the Intelligence Function, and so we bring them to you in "Is Competitive Intelligence an ethical process?"
The advantages of Competitive Intelligence
Competitive Intelligence is a function that is part of the broader discipline of Knowledge Management. From this broader perspective, CI contributes to a potential 25% improvement in total business productivity. We recommend two articles that help you to fit the concept of the Intelligence Function into the company's Knowledge Management:
- 50 first dates: therapies for Alzheimer's disease in the company
- Knowledge management: how to organise knowledge internal and external to the organisation
More specifically, the advantages of Competitive Intelligence are multiple. In summary, we can cite some benefits here, but we recommend reading the article Benefits of Competitive intelligence for the company.
- Reduce costs. Digitizing the Intelligence Function will reduce the costs of keeping you well informed, but the real cost reduction will come from minimizing risks and increasing the resilience of the company to changes.
- Strengthen sales. Detecting potential clients is not the only benefit. There are other non-minor ones, such as continually improving the sales pitch.
- Drive innovation. Competitive Intelligence and Technological Surveillance are the greatest sources of innovative ideas in the company, but they are also essential to achieve a robust innovation focused on the current and future market, updating our knowledge of the State-of-the-Art.
In general, Competitive Intelligence and Technology Watch will provide us with a substantial improvement in decision-making: strategic, departmental, or even at the individual level to improve our personal performance in the company. You can find examples of using Competitive Intelligence in our use cases section.
How to choose the most appropriate Competitive Intelligence solution for my company
Should I look for a solution in the market?
At this stage of civilization and with the volume of information to be handled, it's for sure that we must digitize the Intelligence Function through the implementation of an adequate software solution. Leaving that first decision fixed, we have three options to focus the digital transformation of Competitive Intelligence:
- Use many free tools. And when we say "many" we are talking about a dozen or so. From Google alerts to RSS feed generators, through “free” document management systems, information managers stored on the Internet or searches saved in databases, to name just a few. We will have to manage them separately, integrate the information,… and try to integrate everything in your corporate collaborative environment. You will also have to maintain all of it. It is practically going to require full-time dedication. And when you want to involve your teammates as analysts, their learning curve will be very long because, among other things, it will not be easy for them to manage the great heterogeneity of different sources of information.
- Try to develop your own system, based on an existing open environment; for example, a document management system. Of course, you must have deep knowledge of computer science and programming. Even if you outsource that work, your knowledge will have to be enough to assimilate the development, and maintain it, following the rhythm of technology evolution! If you want to achieve the functions of specialised systems in the market, prepare a good budget of many hundreds of thousands of euros. But are you really going to reinvent Excel, instead of using what is available? Wait a minute ... is your organization dedicated to software, or is its mission different?
- Choose a good software solution for the Intelligence Function that suits your needs. Commercially available solutions already incorporate the knowledge and experience of a multitude of users, thus possibly solving problems that you never thought about. They are proven and - supposedly - they evolve with technology.
How to choose a Competitive Intelligence solution?
Let's suppose then that we are going to choose a commercial solution: How to choose the most appropriate Competitive Intelligence solution for the company? At Antara, we put ourselves in your shoes, and to answer that question we developed a study with the participation of the industry. You can download the result from here:
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In summary, these are the most important features for a company when evaluating market solutions and automating the Competitive Intelligence Function:
- Model business complexity. This has been the highest priority in almost all responses. The business of any company is always complex, and those responsible for Intelligence want to be able to express that complexity when defining the intelligence focuses. Not being able to express our complexity greatly limits the effectiveness of any Intelligence software solution. This is a complexity that is expressed differently according to each department or area of activity of the company. Customer account managers, product managers, R&D or product development managers will focus on different issues. And those issues are interrelated in multiple ways.
- Get the team to collaborate. The companies participating in the Antara study and the CEOs who have responded to a global survey (as you will see below) agree that it is essential to take advantage of 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 in a Collaborative Competitive Intelligence model.
- ... and eight other key features that you will find in the study.
These assessment criteria do not necessarily have to be the same in your case. You may want to add other parameters, or even prioritise them differently.
You can download the file, adapt it to your own criteria, and use it to develop your own comparison. |
To help you in your work, we have developed this Excel workbook that takes into account the criteria generated in the study.
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We aggregate the opinions of all of them into a single analysis, and we are continually updating this comparison for you. You can download this independent comparison of Competitive Intelligence solutions for free. |
But at Antara we didn't stop there. We usually ask any company about their opinions, their comparisons of software solutions for Competitive Intelligence and Technology Watch. We don't care if they are Antara customers or users of other solutions. Or that they have evaluated several and have not yet made up their mind. |
How to successfully implement the Intelligence Function in the company
Let's assume that we have already chosen an appropriate market solution for our current and future needs. To successfully implement the Intelligence Function we can follow the following steps:
- Get the support of Management
- Collect baseline information
- Recruit and train the leading team of the Intelligence Function
- Launch the Competitive Intelligence pilot
- Expand the pilot: towards cruising speed
Step 1: Get Management Support
All corporate projects require the support of Management. Poor Management, with everyone pulling on their sleeves and demanding your attention for this or that…! How will we get her attention and her support? And what do we want from that support?
Since it is about selling the project (in this case "upwards"), we must know the needs of our client.
What does a CEO ask of Competitive Intelligence?
According to a global industry survey, the top demands CEOs make on the Intelligence Function are, in order of priority:
- Actual use of Competitive Intelligence for decision making. A good step towards this goal can be to generate information for decision making through intelligence reports.
- Incorporate the knowledge of the entire team into the Intelligence analysis. Antara's approach to Distributed Intelligence is central to this goal.
- Ensure the company's response capacity to threats.
- Demonstrate Return on Investment in Intelligence. On this issue, you will find more information at:
- the specific section in this Academy about the benefits of the Intelligence Function
- the analysis of the 10 indicators that companies use to measure the impact of Market Intelligence
- our proposal of 7 metrics to measure the impact of competitive intelligence
- the Webinar: How to measure the impact of the Intelligence Function
Therefore, for us to get the attention and collaboration of our first client -the CEO- the software application chosen to digitize the Competitive Intelligence Function must clearly contemplate these objectives. If not, we must rethink the process of evaluating and selecting the software solution.
What do we ask the CEO?
First, approval of the budget. Well, if we have done a first investigation of the market, the indicative budget should be approved before carrying out the analysis of the Intelligence tools to be incorporated into the company ... So let's go to what really matters at this point: we ask the CEO for leadership by example. That is, we are going to ask her to invest at least 15' a week to make visible that she is involved in Competitive Intelligence, reading part of the analysis generated, but above all by providing her comments and interacting with the team. These 15' weekly to make the involvement of the CEO visible will help greatly to drag the entire team.
If your CEO is unwilling to make this small commitment, reconsider whether the organization's culture will allow you to function without her, or whether you have enough traction for your Intelligence Function project.
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Step 2: Gather baseline information
The first executive step will be to collect all the baseline information in the company. In the first place, what sources of information we have already identified in the company. What are the current sources of information? How do we know what competitors are saying? What magazines do we read? Where do we get email newsletters from?
Any company is going to make it a priority to monitor competitors, so we will pay special attention to this issue. How can we organise competitor monitoring? Do we have all the competitors identified? We must also classify them appropriately, as the surveillance of them will differ according to the category to which they belong.
We also need to gather the current focus of interest: what issues are now of concern to teams in different areas of the business. If we do not yet have a structured Intelligence Function, this part can be difficult to develop, because the team will not have given serious thought to what they need to know to develop their performance. Starting with the simplest questions can help you get started.
It is probably too early to set goals beyond tactical competitive intelligence, but you should know that there are intelligence approaches for decision-making further away in time, such as Strategic Intelligence and Long-term Foresight. If you want to know more about these concepts, we recommend some articles, such as:
- The Three Little Pigs: Horizons for designing our Competitive Intelligence
- The Time Machine: Scenario Planning and Competitive Intelligence
We recommend that you start with Tactical Competitive Intelligence and practice it in the company for a few months, before pursuing more ambitious objectives.
Step 3: Recruit internally and train the leadership team of the Intelligence Function
For companies, getting the team to collaborate and getting the most out of their knowledge is their second priority. In fact, we have been moving towards a Collaborative Competitive Intelligence for a long time.
Since we have a team working towards the same objective, we will need coordination. This is where the figure of the leader, facilitator or coordinator of the Intelligence Function emerges. By the way, we find that the majority of people who play this role are women.
The functions of this Corporate Intelligence leader are several:
- Involve the team. As a team leader, this position requires knowing the people, identifying who we are going to involve, who needs to be given more help or attention to get involved in the process.
- Models the Intelligence needs of company departments. For this, the coordinator interviews the internal clients of Competitive Intelligence collects their Intelligence needs and interprets them in the Intelligence system or software solution. This task will be more or less straightforward, depending on the Competitive Intelligence software solution chosen.
- Distribute analysis responsibilities. Assign the intelligence hypotheses to specific people with the ability to analyze, based on their experience and knowledge. And it also predetermines with what depth each person will attend to each focus since not all of us have the same level of knowledge or interest in each of the topics.
- Monitor and continuously improve the function. Obtains the operating metrics of the system, and develops continuous improvement actions to optimize the benefit for the company. For this purpose, Antara offers a complete manual in the User Academy.
How much effort does that coordination require?
In the Collaborative Competitive Intelligence approach developed by Antara, very few companies designate a person fully dedicated to this Intelligence coordination function. Even in companies with dozens or a hundred people involved, the leadership role is assigned to a part-time person. In our experience, coordinating a team of 20 to 40 analysts requires less than 2 hours per week (5% of a person's time). Of course, if the coordinator also performs information analyst tasks, that dedication must be added to the previous estimate.
A single coordinator for the entire company?
In reality, there are very few cases in which a single person performs this function. The usual thing is that it is a minimum of 2 people, at least at the beginning. If only for having a support person, and ensuring the investment of the startup project. In the extreme case, we have found implementations where there are dozens of Competitive Intelligence leaders since there is at least one pair for each department of the company, and even by sector or geographical area. In any case, this entire team must be under the direction of a single Intelligence coordinator at the corporate level. This coordinator must ensure that the leadership team is adequately trained, has all the necessary resources, and follows the common guidelines to carry out their work.
With the chosen lead team and with the collected starting information, we can now tackle the formation of the team, to learn how to manage the software solution that we have chosen to digitize the Intelligence Function.
Step 4: Launch the Competitive Intelligence Function pilot
From Antara, we recommend first launching a pilot in which to involve a limited number of people who will act as analysts. We suggest you consider a number between 5 and 15 people, added to the leading team that we have already trained.
We will strengthen the chances of the pilot success if we avoid doing a “political” pilot project: instead of involving a few people from each of the company's areas, let's choose only one or two departments, and involve the maximum number of people with the budget available. This will maximize team collaboration in a new environment, and we will get an example of good practice to show to other departments.
You will need to perform an internal sale of the project, and for this to prepare explanatory material and present the objectives and steps to take to the affected people. You will have to introduce the initiative to new analysts, who will not have undergone any training. If we have chosen the Competitive Intelligence software solution well, these people will hardly need training. Antara offers specific introductory materials for analysts in its User Academy . We suggest you read this article about analysts' good practices: What makes you a good competitive intelligence analyst?
We will learn in this phase how to lead the subsequent expansion to the entire company. Antara also offers specific resources to help you in this task.
The objective of the pilot is to put into practice what was learned in the administration course and to practice the leadership that we talked about above. Let's focus on this goal, but for how long?
How much time should I invest in the pilot?
We will stay in the pilot stage until we feel comfortable developing our coordinating role, and we have learned enough from our new relationship with the Intelligence Function's internal analysts and clients. Depending on the features of the chosen software solution, and the quality of the training and support received from the provider, we will invest between a couple of weeks and three months.
During the pilot, let's practice, above all, the methods of monitoring and continuous improvement of the exploitation. This task will be much easier for you if you follow the Continuous improvement manual for Editors of Antara Mussol .
Step 5: Expand Competitive Intelligence in the company: towards cruising speed
Thanks to the lessons learned from the pilot experience, we will be able to minimize risks and adequately plan the extension of the Intelligence Function to the entire company.
At this point we will have to make decisions on various aspects such as, for example:
- Adopt a distributed or centralized system for Administration services. The more distributed the lead team - for example, an Intelligence leader per department - the more coordination effort we will need.
- The design of information privacy and user access. Will we model Intelligence needs that should not be visible to the entire company?
- Involve external innovation collaborators in technology watch. Are we going to invite our external R&D collaborators to participate in the Technology Watch of joint projects?
- Take advantage of Competitive Intelligence to provide value-added services to customers. Are we interested in adding value to our clients with a little extra effort?
In the cruise phase of your Intelligence Function, it will be very important to attend to the monitoring and continuous improvement task. As in any system, predictive maintenance will always be preferable: we must obtain statistics on the exploitation of the system, easily detect points of improvement, and act on them.
Do you have doubts?
Would you like to talk about your case?
Contact us!
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