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Importance of Competitive Intelligence

Chartered Management Institute

Why is Competitive Intelligence important and beneficial to your activities? Related Content: What can you use Competitive Intelligence for? competitive intelligenceKnow Your Enemy Basic Gap Analysis Using Creativity During SWOT Analysis Early Warning. You are not watching this post, click to start watching.

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Thoughts on Competitive Intelligence

Chartered Management Institute

Some thoughts on the benefits of Competitive Intelligence. You are not watching this post, click to start watching

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What can you use Competitive Intelligence for?

Chartered Management Institute

Competitive Intelligence is becoming an increasingly common. What can you use Competitive Intelligence for? Related Content: Know Your Enemy Basic Gap Analysis Using Creativity During SWOT Analysis Early Warning Competitive Intelligence - Mergers within Law Firms. competitive intelligenceYou are not watching this post, click to start watching.

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First Steps to a Competitive Intelligence function

Chartered Management Institute

You may be interested in Competitive Intelligence, already have a function or you may be thinking about setting up some sort of Competitive Intelligence (CI) operation within your company. What do you need to do to set up a Competitive Intelligence function. competitive Intelligence; strategyNormal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE.

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An Introduction to Competitive Intelligence

Chartered Management Institute

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Starting A Car Sales Business Is Easier Than You Think

Strategy Driven

Using something like competitive intelligence tools will show you how well your competitors are doing and how you can outdo them. Starting Your Business Auto trade business business management Competitive intelligence tools strategydriven

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How Competitive Intelligence Rules Encourage Cheating

Harvard Business Review

Yet when it comes to lower-level employees responsible for gathering competitive intelligence, those same lawyers impose Draconian rules that prevent employees from speaking with a competitor directly, or even engaging a third party to speak with a competitor on their behalf. Such unrealistic rules are no more likely to stop the flow of competitive information than Prohibition stopped the flow of liquor. His most recent book is The Secret Language of Competitive Intelligence.

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Companies Collect Competitive Intelligence, but Don’t Use It

Harvard Business Review

The first requirement for being competitive is to know what others in your space are offering or plan to offer so you can judge the unique value proposition of your moves. The second requirement is to anticipate response to your competitive moves so that they are not derailed by unexpected reactions. In my experience, the competitive perspective is almost always the least important aspect in managerial decision-making. How much do they spend on mandatory competition review?

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Only Half of Companies Actually Use the Competitive Intelligence They Collect

Harvard Business Review

For more than 30 years, most large corporations worldwide have adopted competitive intelligence (CI) as a way to expedite good decisions. The single most effective way to ensure intelligence is used in any given decision is to give the analyst a say in moving it forward. That is the one area where “intelligent organizations” differ most from others. None of these steps involves spending millions on the intelligence or hiring legions of analysts.

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Use Your Sales Force’s Competitive Intelligence Wisely

Harvard Business Review

That competitive intelligence can not only help individual salespeople become more effective, it can also help your company make better strategic decisions. Hughes of Michigan State University and Adam Rapp of the University of Alabama shows that in the wrong hands, competitive intelligence can have a negative impact on sales and market share. My colleagues and I have seen numerous examples of sales forces gaining important competitive knowledge.

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Understand Your Competitors Objectives

Chartered Management Institute

competitive Intelligence; strategyOne of the best ways to understand your Competitors is to understand their objectives. We suggest ways we can do this. You are not watching this post, click to start watching.

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Know Your Enemy

Chartered Management Institute

Graeme Dixon looks at how competitive intelligence could benefit your company. Related Content: Basic Gap Analysis Using Creativity During SWOT Analysis Early Warning Competitive Intelligence - Mergers within Law Firms Are you giving away your information? competitive intelligenceThis article was written for the Law Society Magazine, February 2011 Edition.

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Basic Gap Analysis

Chartered Management Institute

Related Content: Using Creativity During SWOT Analysis Early Warning What can you use Competitive Intelligence for? A Gap is simply the difference to where you and your competitors are. A Positive Gap indicates you are in a better position than your rivals while a Negative Gap clearly means the reverse - in a worse position. So what is Basic Gap Analysis? The OODA Loop Can you force innovation? You are not watching this post, click to start watching

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Using Creativity During SWOT Analysis

Chartered Management Institute

Related Content: Early Warning What can you use Competitive Intelligence for? The SWOT analysis can be a rather dry (but very important) part of the strategic process for most managers. They give the exercise lip service, and that ends up lowering the validity of the exercise. How can they do a better job? Let's look at some ideas. The OODA Loop Can you force innovation? Human Capital Measurement. You are not watching this post, click to start watching

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A Failure To Act – The Leader’s 5 Most Damaging Inactions

Lead Change Blog

As we vacillate, competition can eat our lunch, or worse, as HR expert Ron Thomas points out in his article on indecision. Failure To Inform – It’s difficult enough to gain competitive intelligence; why would we withhold our own? For every action there is a reaction. But for the leader’s 5 worst inactions, there is often a chain reaction of undesirable consequences. Failure To Make A Decision – Indecision can paralyze an organization.

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Let the recruitment begin

Chartered Management Institute

Managing your way out of the recession Getting a Yes with Competitive Intelligence Seven Ways to Be a Better Manager in a Recession. Private sector recovery well underway - aparently. Related Content: Can you force innovation? How important are employee benefits during these difficult times? You are not watching this post, click to start watching

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Knowledge Transfer Is Key To Sustaining Business Excellence

Six Disciplines

BOTTOMLINE: For small and midsized businesses to remain competitive, a formalized process of knowledge transfer (of trends, policies, procedures, information gathering, competitive intelligence, and so on.) As baby boomers retire, companies are failing - in a big way - to transfer knowledge to the next generation of workers.

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Into the mind of your Competitor

Chartered Management Institute

You do not have to be an expert in Competitive Intelligence (C.I.) to realise that the economy has undergone significant realignment over the last year remonding us all that business is inter-dependent. This article will introduce you to the power of C.I. and some of the analytical thought patterns required. Related Content: Where to start when analysing your rivals What is your Competitors strategic intent? You are not watching this post, click to start watching read more.

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Will Social Media feature as part of your communications toolkit in 2012?

Chartered Management Institute

Related Content: My business book of the week - Understanding the small business sector - by David Storey The Invisible Tweets of the Mass Media: How Social Media is Changing the Fundamentals of News Let the recruitment begin Getting a Yes with Competitive Intelligence Are you confused over social media? Companies are doing it, Government is doing it and so is the community and voluntary sector as well as individuals.

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Small businesses increasing marketing spend

Chartered Management Institute

Related Content: 9 Time Saving Tips from a Social Networking Junkie Opportunity to meet entrepreneur Celia Gates and prizewinning marketing gurus Shaun Smith and Andy Milligan Revised Checklist on Marketing Yourself Ten Steps to Smash Urban Legends Competitive Intelligence on a shoe string. A study carried out by Yougov has found that a third of small businesses are planning to increase their marketing spend next year.

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Social Media for CEOs

N2Growth Blog

Social media also allows you access to business, market, and competitive intelligence in real time. . By Mike Myatt , Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth. Nary a week passes where I don’t hear from a CEO who’s grappling with this social media conundrum: should I, or shouldn’t I?

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Can you force innovation?

Chartered Management Institute

What can you use Competitive Intelligence for? Human race has been innovating ever since. That’s how we got here. The process had its ups and downs over the millenniums but was it ever planned and executed as part of one group’s deliberate strategy or it happened organically as a result of many factors e.g. social developments that triggered the upswing cycle in this process? Many politicians and business leaders are calling today for innovation upswing cycle to be triggered.

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Keeping Tabs on the Competition as a Start-Up

Harvard Business Review

Big companies have it easy when it comes to gathering and utilizing competitive intelligence. But competitive intelligence – data gleaned from mostly public sources and analyzed for patterns, trends, and positioning – is important for investors and shareholders, customers, and employees (from business development to product to customer service). Start by creating a competitive intel repository and committing to its maintenance.

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A guide to great development moves

Great Leadership By Dan

Some ways to prepare are to review business information such as strategy documentation, meeting notes, presentation material, competitive intelligence reports, and country/cultural information. Changing jobs is an often used and effective way to develop new leadership capabilities. I wrote the following guide when I worked for a large global company (“ABC”) to help support a strategy to move executives across at least two functions, businesses, and countries.

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How to Actually Put Your Marketing Data to Use

Harvard Business Review

In most companies, marketers are in charge of assessing the competition. Because of this, close to 60 percent of all competitive intelligence professionals report to marketing. Yet the majority of marketers fail to use their competition analysts strategically, instead using them to gather more “recon” data. To get more strategic value out of your competitive intelligence analysts: Impose focus with a strategic framework. Dave Wheeler FOR HBR.

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Managing Risky Behavior

Harvard Business Review

How Competitive Intelligence Rules Encourage Cheating. Welcome to HBR's Insight Center on Managing Risky Behavior. Risk is a topic that has been very much in the front of people's minds since the property and credit crunch of 2008 ushered in the Great Recession. Every day, it seems, there is some new crisis that makes us ask how "they" could have let this happen. They" have many identities.

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You Can Make Your Sales Data a Lot Better with a Little Discipline

Harvard Business Review

Business intelligence is projected to grow to a nearly $26.9 Whether it’s the customer relationship management platforms used by sales teams, enterprise resource planning software used by purchasing teams, or the account-based marketing technology employed by marketing teams, the business intelligence platform can recognize a unique URL and attach it to clean, usable data. Vincent Tsui for HBR. billion industry by 2021, but its solutions are only as good as the data behind it.

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The Right Way to Use Analytics Isn’t for Planning

Harvard Business Review

We must start to think differently about how business, management, and strategic intelligence works. In other words, the goal for strategic intelligence is not to collect market information to make plans , but to use that information to generate insights that in turn support ever-changing perspectives. Intelligence analysts live in a different knowledge context from managers. Use competitive intelligence differently. Study personal use of intelligence.

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Why the Best Salespeople Get So Lucky

Harvard Business Review

I found that the greater a salesperson’s belief that success is a combination of luck and effort and that good luck will come along sooner or later, the greater his or her sales activities, such as making phone calls, meeting prospects, qualifying prospects, and gathering intelligence about prospects and competitors. Gathering competitive intelligence. The more field intelligence a salesperson has, the smarter and luckier he or she becomes.

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Managing Risks Means Managing Arguments

Harvard Business Review

How Competitive Intelligence Rules Encourage Cheating. So it was Lyme disease that did it! The tick-borne illness kept JPMorgan Chase's Ina Drew out of the office for extended periods in 2010 and 2011. And it was during Drew's absences, according to a richly detailed account in The New York Times , that the bank's chief investment office, which she ran, began to get into trouble: The morning conference calls Ms.

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Viral By Design: Teams in the Networked World

Harvard Business Review

Now you can line them all up, from social media, consumer insights, competitive intelligence, marketplace measurement, sales, and distribution. With almost a billion friends on Facebook, six billion cell phone accounts globally, and twenty billion "things" from refrigerators to bridge spans to micro-medical devices soon to be wired by Internet, the digital age is upon us in full force.

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Are Apple’s Patent Wars a Marketing Strategy?

Harvard Business Review

The opening statements by Apple’s lawyer, Harold McElhinny, alleging that “Samsung copied the iPhone” and that “Samsung went far beyond the world of competitive intelligence and crossed into the dark side” were translated in a multitude of languages and displayed next to pictures of Steve Jobs, one of the most charismatic CEOs of all time. Apple Competition Tech industry The latest battle in the three-year long Apple-Samsung patent saga concluded few weeks ago.

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JP Morgan's Loss: Bigger than "Risk Management"

Harvard Business Review

How Competitive Intelligence Rules Encourage Cheating. The recent disclosure of a multi-billion dollar trading loss at JPMorgan Chase reminds us again of the challenge and complexity of risk management, the subject of our June 2012 HBR article, "Managing Risks: A New Framework." Many people, including quite a few U.S. legislators and regulators, believe that risks can be managed by establishing and following rules, standards and guidelines.

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Get More from Your Event Spending

Harvard Business Review

With potential customers, your goal may involve making initial contact, establishing a brand presence, gathering competitive intelligence, or getting follow-up calls with relevant prospects. Event marketing is currently a very expensive and sloppy process in most firms because the relevant information is fragmented, difficult to assemble, and the “database” is often a pile of business cards. But it needn’t be that way.

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Big Data Demands Big Context

Harvard Business Review

Use Your Sales Force’s Competitive Intelligence Wisely. When Microsoft built Windows 8, its goal was to move beyond operating-system conventions that were based on outdated user-behavior assumptions and create an OS for the way people really use computers today. Microsoft’s engineers discovered that people were doing less of the time-consuming writing and creating that had once been the norm. Increasingly, users were socializing for short bursts.

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How to Get More Value Out of Your Data Analysts

Harvard Business Review

They become more adept at finding data and using business intelligence and visual analytics tools, more rigorous in using established tools like spreadsheets, and thus better able to meet many of their analytical needs independently and immediately. Use Your Sales Force’s Competitive Intelligence Wisely.

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The Future Is Scary. Creative Thinking Can Help.

Harvard Business Review

What is your organization’s competitive space, and are there ways it might be redefined? Megatrends will affect your company, your customers, your competition, as well as your family and community. This will enable you to look at data — whether trends, customer research, or competitive intelligence — in fresh ways, to be better prepared for an uncertain future.

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American Competitiveness Demands Immigration Reform

Harvard Business Review

The perspectives and intuitive customer insights that come from having diverse employees — particularly employees who share cultural connections with customers — is real competitive intelligence. Having global, cultural, gender, and generational diversity is a serious business asset that confers significant competitive advantage in the global marketplace. Much of the insight and global perspective American companies need to be competitive can be found on U.S.

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Cyber Security in the Internet of Things

Harvard Business Review

What''s more, as systems built by different OEMs interact, there is infighting among them as to what constitutes sensitive or competitive intelligence. Why Businesses Should Share Intelligence About Cyber Attacks.

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What to Say and Do When Your Employee Has Another Job Offer

Harvard Business Review

One side benefit of your employees getting other job offers is the “competitive intelligence” you get as a result, says Grote. It’s normal to get a sinking feeling when one of your employees says, “I have something to tell you.” ” No manager wants to hear that someone on their team has another job offer in hand. But how should you actually respond to the news? Should you counteroffer? Or just accept that they’re moving on?

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Case Study: Follow Dubious Orders or Speak Up?

Harvard Business Review

She understood that gathering competitive intelligence required “creativity”—after all, you were seeking information that your rivals wanted to keep private—but this seemed like it might be crossing the line. At first, Susan Kim wasn’t sure whether she’d heard her new manager correctly. The phone line was relatively clear for a call between San Francisco and Seoul, but she still asked Sukbin Moon to repeat himself.

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How a Food-Ordering App Broke into a Crowded Market

Harvard Business Review

This ensured two things: a) less competition from large firms and b) different activities required to serve customers. That’s the “secret” of successful strategies and the essence of competitive intelligence. Competitive strategy ArticleIt’s not easy to find companies that genuinely do things differently.