Competitive Intelligence (CI) is the process of analyzing, gathering, and using information collected on competitors, customers, and other market factors that contribute to your competitive advantage. Companies rely on CI data to develop effective and efficient business practices.
CI consists of two types of intelligence: tactical and strategic. Tactical is shorter-term intelligence, which seeks to provide input into issues like capturing market share or increasing revenues, while strategic focuses on longer-term issues, like key risks and opportunities facing the organization, and emerging trends and patterns.
Understanding competitor motivations and behaviors is critical to driving innovation, shaping product development, establishing pricing and brand positioning, and so much more. Companies must collect proper CI in order to identify challenges, advantages, and white spaces and build a competitive strategy equipped to compete and thrive.
Technology has transformed the CI industry, making it possible for organizations to compile data from multiple sources in a timely manner to facilitate rapid decision-making. Through actionable insights, companies can respond to changes in their markets quickly to keep up with competition. At the core of actionable insights is real-time CI. With real-time CI, companies deliver timely intelligence to the right people, increasing organizational agility.
When looking to collect CI, it’s important to plan out which insights are of value to you, how to identify your competitors, and which markets to spend time on. Take time to narrow in on your direct competitors, research objectives, and areas of interest.
Are companies focusing on CI? These metrics might surprise you.
90% of Fortune 500 companies practice competitive intelligence. (Source: Emerald Insight)
Over 73% of businesses are investing more than 20% of overall technology budgets on intelligence and data analytics. (Source: Forbes)
61% of executives view rapid decision-making and execution as essential factors for a company’s success, and 34% consider the ability to access the right information at the right time as key factors for a company’s success. (Source: The Economist)
69% of organizations that have used an external partner to gain better data insight report positive results from that decision. (Source: The Economist)
57% of companies state that gaining a competitive advantage is one of the top 3 priorities in their industry. (Source: Forbes)
The 6 ways CI benefits your organization.
CI empowers everyone on teams, from product managers and marketers, to sales and executive teams. With the right CI, you can:
Uncover Key Data Points: Through examining new data points like significant acquisitions, new patent filings, startup investments, technology transfer agreements, research papers, etc., you can uncover pivotal data points that have the potential to influence major decisions.
Plan Strategic Moves: CI facilitates building your long-term business strategy and finding market gaps, allowing you to make the right business decisions for your organization.
Track industry Trends: Live-data CI lets you watch for new technologies, track new movement, stay on top of industry innovation trends, and predict future movement.
Drive Innovation: CI helps you to identify new market opportunities and spaces to innovate, accelerate your new product development, design better products, and improve market positioning.
Outsmart Competition: Think of CI as competitive insurance to ensure you stay on top of competitor strengths and weaknesses, anticipate what they’re planning, and identify competitor position and messaging. With CI you can uncover new product launches and services your competitors are adding, and benchmark your company against others.
Minimize Risk: Making the wrong move is costly. CI helps you prevent unsuccessful projects from taking off, save on costs, and improve decision-making ROI. With CI data, you can identify and prioritize any gaps within your business, and feel comfortable knowing you're making data-backed decisions.
Where to go from here: Actionable intelligence platforms are here to help.
Manually collecting CI takes time, and is costly. Not to mention doing your own research digging on the Internet for low-hanging fruit means you'll likely miss key data points that don't provide you with the whole picture. In the time it takes traditional market intelligence or research analysts to gather data to build into basic and applied research reports, you can receive data automatically through a platform like Cypris.
Designed specifically to deliver actionable innovation intelligence to R&D teams, Cypris improves the efficiency of data collation and interpretation. By aggregating your desired data, Cypris enables users to answer critical questions that influence the brand, margin, and profitability of your organization. Users have identified new entrants, significant IP, groundbreaking research papers, and more that have ultimately swayed the course of major projects.
Ready for real-time data on your competitors? Visit cypris.ai to get started by booking a demo.
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