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- We work primarily at the front end of
competitive intelligence -- the hunting-and- gathering part,
as well as the analysis part. Hunting-and-gathering is a time-honored
competitive technique, even when it's done with new technology.
The colorized old technology cave painting below-right is from
Lascaux, in south-central France, roughly 18,000 B.C.
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- We're still, some 20,000 years later,
imaging and analyzing the game, even if the techniques and technologies
have evolved. More windows and light in our caves. Less grunting
and pointing, perhaps, but then perhaps not, come to think of
it.
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 Hunting-and-gathering
involves, as you might imagine, finding the hard-to-find. Its
techniques are part art, part science, part experience, and,
yes... part luck. We've legally obtained blueprints for a new
factory in the wilds of Europe. We've found out why a company
in Germany was building a modern new factory when none seemed
called for, given our client's understanding of the market. We've
explored the deep but disavowed relationship between a foreign
head of state and one of our governmental agencies. We've done
a number of things over the years. Some of our competitive intelligence
projects are sketched out below.
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- We've been working in competitive intelligence
since 1983, which is a long time for this business. Teasing the
truth from a reluctant world is interesting work.
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- We couldn't resist including a few chapters
of our venerable book, The Competitive Intelligence Handbook.
Yes, we're finally doing the new book, due out in the summer
of 2007, but the orientation to the field and the competitive
intelligence underpinnings are as valid today as they were when
the book was written. The search engines have changed, but that's
what search engines do. Remember when AltaVista was king? Then
it was Yahoo, followed by Google, followed by ASK. A colleague
once said, keeping up with the search engine du jour is like
changing a tire on a moving car.
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- Some of our CI projects...
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- Mirror Projects - how does the world see
us?
They hired us to look at them in depth,
at their own corporation, not at a competitor. Why? They wanted
to know how a hostile intruder would perform. What would he find
out? "Show us what would happen if our chief competitor
hired a good CI professional to look at us." So we did.
They found some of the results scary.
Get the truth.
"...to see ourselves as others see
us."
Robert Burns 1759 - 1796
- Acquisitions
- Competitive analysis of glass packaging
companies
- Find new markets for a newly-acquired
conveyor company
- This small food company is written about
broadly, but how is it run, really?
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- Decision support
- We did a project for a clothing manufacturer.
They wanted us
to talk to their peer companies, their competitors (they provided
the
list), about how they were perceived within the trade. The head
of
marketing had his own perceptions, but he chose this as a way
of
confirming what he believed, and chose a big annual meeting to
drop this
bombshell on everyone. "Much better than if it came from
me," he told us
later. Interestingly, this manager also wanted to get the attention
of
upper management, not just people who worked under him. It worked.
We call this a-hold-up-the-mirror project.
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- Industry surveys
- Food industry - over 3 thousand projects
- Rigid container industry
- Glass packaging industry
- Ball screws and linear motion bearings
- Air conveyors and materials handling
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- Product surveys
- How successful is the American Express
gift cheque?
- Can a hi-tech German shrink-wrap machine
succeed in the US?
- How does the Federal WIC program work?
- Foreign influences on growth of Ford AG
following WW II
- Research and development
- What are the possible reasons for a food-coating
problem?
- Strategic analysis
- What are the capabilities of a Scandinavian
chemical company?
- Locate a set of blueprints for a foreign
company's new plant.
- Why is a German chemical company building
a new plant?
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