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CI Book from EMP
Competitor Intelligence
Strategy, Tools and Techniques for Competitive Advantage. |  |
This book helps you identify the key factors for implementing a successful competitor intelligence strategy. | | | |  | |
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| Top Tips for CI
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Fruits of Experience
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January, 2009 |
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Andrew Pollard passes on some of the Fruits of Experience
At an EMP workshop recently, Andrew Pollard, Director of EMP Intelligence Service, was asked by a couple of delegates what were the biggest learning curves in his 20 years or so doing work in CI. He said there were four major fruits of experience.
Fruits of Experience No 1
The first fruit, he said, was that academic models, such as Porters Five Forces Model, should be used with great care. They were not that helpful in real world analysis, Andrew said. Build your own company models to help you understand your competitive environment. And get training to help you build them. Do not write CI reports like an MBA dissertations. Develop a presentation template based on requirements.
Fruits of Experience No 2
A second fruit was the importance of testing your intelligence output. We should think of them as products. Something which is produced for an internal marketplace – maybe just one person – designed for a purpose set by the customer and polished for maximum convenience and benefit for the customer. Testing your CI products should be done as rigorously as a company tests its products for the external market. A persons career depend could depend on it.
Fruits of Experience No 3
Persuade senior managers of the benefits of getting a good CI Strategy preferably before setting up a CI operation. A plan that sets out what CI strategies the business should pursue and for what benefits. With clear measures of success which means that CI should contribute to the bottom line and/or to competitiveness.
Fruits of Experience No 4
Avoid collecting shed loads of information. Some years ago in some research a City of London institution discovered that large amounts of information can actually make you ill. It can certainly make you completely muddled and overwhelmed. The problem is that if you ask vague woolly questions in your CI research you will undoubtedly end up with haystacks of data in which it will be very difficult to find golden nuggets of intelligence. So if you want to avoid “Overload Illness” ask the right questions upfront and keep asking them until they are idiot-proof.
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