Improve Your Competitive Intelligence Skill: Move out of Your Comfort Zone

How often do we get stuck in patterns and either make mistakes or don’t see events coming? In competitive intelligence, we look for what isn’t or what looks odd or out of place since oddity often is a precursor to change. There is always surprise in life and business. How we prepare ourselves for it is what separates the excellent from the average. I find I react better to surprises if I get out of my comfort zone more often.

Assess the Reliability of Your Research Network

How do you assess the reliability of your human sources? I consider their motivation to know what you’re trying to learn as a primary yardstick towards reliability, although people don’t always tell the truth or in the spirit of trying to be helpful when they don’t know…they unintentionally misinform. What’s been your experience?

Design Thinking for Strategic Competitive Advantage

The simple idea behind design thinking is that leaders need two key traits: the exploratory innovative to produce great ideas, and the analytical that exploits the business, improves the offering, and develops the right processes to gain market share. he ideas behind design thinking are well expressed in Roger Martin’s The Design of Business. Think of both the learning and the discovery process as moving through a knowledge funnel. People need to apply analysis and creative thinking at different points within that funnel. Morton suggests that to develop your design mind, broaden your “personal knowledge system.” Design thinking and operating can give your company and you a competitive advantage since they provide a good balance between innovation and operational excellence and often uncover business and individual blind spots. What a competitive advantage!

Denver Writing & Competitive Intelligence Event

Jenny Shank and I will speak at a publishing venue sponsored by the Denver Notre Dame women on November 5 at Good Shepherd Catholic School Cafeteria at 620 Elizabeth St Denver 80206 starting at 6 p.m. Jenny will read from her book, The Ringer and I will talk about my journey in publishing in my field, competitive intelligence.

Why Cooperative Intelligence? An Extreme Presentation

Recently, I wrote about the Extreme Presentation format for presenting material to smaller audiences. At the conclusion of that post, I gave an example of how Extreme Presentation looks. This post describes and illustrates an example of Extreme Presentation by defining what and how to use cooperative intelligence in competitive intelligence or research.

Why & How Extreme Presentation Works

Dr. Andrew Abela recently wrote a second book on Extreme Presentation. The first book detailed how to create an Extreme Presentation while this book provides a simple case study which illustrates clearly how Extreme Presentation can be created at companies, particularly for smaller audiences. It’s powerful as most of us present to small audiences, and usually want to persuade them to take a certain course of action. This is the objective of Extreme Presentation.

Be Competitive! 22 Tips to Kick Start Your Marketing

Mary Ellen Bates delivered an excellent AIIP webinar on how to market your business more effectively using her tested and tried best practices using the telephone, snail mail and social networks. You will want to buy her book, Building and Running a Successful Research Business” for even more than the 23 tippers she shared. Free webinars are a great AIIP benefit and all webinars are taped for later listening for the membership.

Do You Question Your Assumptions?

If you want to stay in business for the long haul, you need to be observant about your marketplace, question your assumptions, and be willing to make changes! Dr. Redelmeier, a physician researcher says, “Do not get trapped into prior thoughts. It’s perfectly OK to change your mind as you learn more.” While his world of research evolves around behavior, his practice of questioning and researching around your assumptions, and his willingness to change based on learning, will benefit researchers of all types and including those running a competitive intelligence operation.

Sales Intelligence from the Competitive Intelligence Expert Panel at SLA 2010

This blog contains wisdom from the competitive intelligence expert panel from SLA’s 2010 annual conference. This blog focuses on their discussion around PTW (price to win) and win loss analysis. It’s remarkable than only 20% of companies even do win loss analysis given its great insight into customers and competitors!

Competitive Intelligence Talks at SLA’s 2010 Conference

In the spirit of cooperative intelligence, here are short excerpts about the 7 competitive intelligence presentations that will be given at SLA 2010 Annual Conference held in New Orleans from June 12 – 16, 2010 at the New Orleans Convention Center.