Posts Tagged ‘Ahead’

In the information age, the value of information cannot be underestimated. Some big companies, in fact, have entire departments devoted to gathering competitive information.

You must be careful however, not to get so wrapped up in gathering information that you wait too long to act. You must be able to act early on in your research into a competitor’s upcoming product launch. By beating your competition, you can close out your competitor’s distribution channel. But if you dilly dally too long, your options to respond to a competitor’s move becomes smaller.

One company that provides training in competitive intelligence for example, warns entrepreneurs not to lie or misrepresent themselves or who they work for. In fact, there’s a law – the Economic Espionage Act – that governs the legalities of gathering competitive intelligence.

Here are a few tips on how you can get information about your competition so you can use them in creating effective marketing brochures for your ad campaign:

1. Exploit open sources

There is no better way to jumpstart than with Google. This database is the most used search engine in the Web. On Google, search for the company’s name or the industry to find out more about the competition.

Other sources include search engines for industry-focused Web pages, market research, economic analysis, as well as company reports that sell research by the page. This way, you can buy only the pages you need, instead of having to buy the entire report. But before you pay for your information, check whether you can get the same information for free from other sites.

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2. Get the help of everyone at your company and as many customers, vendors, and others as possible.

Talking to people remains the most effective way to gather intelligence. Use your employees to be your eyes and ears in the marketplace, in your industry – even in your company’s reception area.

For instance, your receptionist can be one of your most valuable sources of information. I know of a brochure printing company that routinely keeps vendors waiting for 10 to 15 minutes after they arrive at the reception area to allow the receptionists to listen in on their conversation. More often than not, these vendors will talk about other brochure printing companies or deals that have been offered to them. The receptionist then has been instructed to immediately email these information to the concerned staff so he or she is better prepared to negotiate when it’s time for them to meet.

Within your company, there is a wealth of information. I am aware of a large pharmaceutical firm that pirates staff from other pharmaceutical companies so that they can get inside information. To help employees understand what kind of information you’re after, circulate a list of the factors that are critical to your company’s success and let them know that these factors will determine their individual successes.

3. Cultivate relationships with competition.

There is no better way to get information than to get it directly from the horse’s mouth. Most of these businesspeople know that in order to get information, they also have to give information. As they say, you are going to be much more interesting to talk to if you have something that they would be interested in. You have to be careful though, that you do not give too much.

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Question by roya67: Is it IQ or EQ that gets you ahead in the work place?
What kind of intelligence works best in the work place in today’s competitive environment? The person with an above average IQ or the person with above average people skills?

Best answer:

Answer by tmmygrl007
depends on what career track you’re going for
science or anything like it – you may want a high IQ
business or real estate – probably EQ

but that doesn’t mean you can be brain-dead or socially retarted for a job

Give your answer to this question below!

Today companies are being forced to cope with rising litigation risk because the business environment is simply more litigious. This increased litigiousness has produced a more rigorous due diligence requirement that involves a greater focus on the way intelligence is gathered and the processes associated with it. Part of this rigorous protocol is to monitor the IP landscape generally and competitive targets specifically (companies, products and technologies), before a decision is made to pursue one or more candidates.

You can monitor technology in a variety of ways as it is being developed. At the inception of a technology, research platforms can provide only limited assistance because patents aren’t typically filed until about halfway through the product lifecycle.

The lifecycle of the product usually begins with basic research and progresses through a developmental stage until it is mature enough to patent. After the technology is mature and protected, marketing plans begin to emerge as it is applied to products and finally introduced to the market.

Because results of patent analysis rely in part on patent data, there isn’t a way to use it to thoroughly evaluate the technology between inception and patent prosecution. Innography can assist with evaluating the company, along with its current product and patent portfolio during that phase. But much of the competitive intelligence (CI) research must be performed in more conventional ways.

In the beginning, it can be monitored using resources such as research papers and grey literature. This method is a very important complement to research that can be performed using a research platform. Using the platform, you can see what companies are investing in which technologies, which can be very good technology investment indicators. It can point you to materials that indicate which type of investments in future technologies are being made today.

As the technology becomes well defined and is deemed to be viable, you can rely on R&D Alliances and joint ventures such as open innovation networks to understand the developmental progress. At this point, the focus of your CI gathering should shift from understanding the technology, to a complete understanding of the company who is investing in its development.

Finally, as the technology comes online and patents are filed and granted, you can begin to understand with greater clarity which of your CI targets represents the best investment and least risk. This is where your IP business intelligence platform i.e. patent software becomes critical.

You need to be able to overlay the IP data with business and legal data to give it a business context. It is important to know, for example, whether the new technology really is new and whether its patent is similar to other patents held by litigious companies. In such a case, they might already be aware of the patent and are simply waiting for an acquisition or licensing deal so that they can sue someone with much deeper pockets than the inventor.

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