Four Types of Strategic Decisions You Can Make Using Competitive Intelligence Insights

There are some four types of strategic decisions you can make using competitive intelligence insights. We will be exploring the said strategic decisions shortly. But before proceeding to explore the said strategic decisions, we need to get ourselves acquainted with competitive intelligence. That is where we come to learn that competitive intelligence can be defined as simply being business intelligence that is collected with the objective of enhancing competitive advantage. It can also be described as business intelligence that has the capability SWOT analysis reports to yield competitive advantage (whether or not it is actually collected with the objective of enhancing such competitive advantage). The latter description is important, because we often seen people holding competitive intelligence in their hands, yet being unable to figure out its potency. The intelligence in question is normally with respect to emerging opportunities and threats. Early awareness of emerging opportunities or threats can yield competitive advantage (and that is a well known fact).

Contrary to what many people may imagine, collection of competitive intelligence is not just a matter of espionage (as is the case with, say, the collection of security intelligence). In fact, strictly speaking, there is very little espionage in the collection of competitive intelligence. Most of the literature we have on competitive intelligence best practices actually seems to be against any form of covert espionage. For the most part, competitive advantage is obtained through straightforward (but careful) observation of trends, and then figuring out what they are likely to translate into in the future. Simple things like newspaper articles touching on political events can end up being rich sources of competitive intelligence. The usefulness of the intelligence obtained is likely to depend to a large extent on whether its collection is done with adherence to competitive intelligence best practices, and how well inferences are made from the raw information gathered.

Now as we said earlier, there are four types of strategic decisions you can make using competitive intelligence insights. Those include:

 

 

There are some four types of strategic decisions you can make using competitive intelligence insights. We will be exploring the said strategic decisions shortly. But before proceeding to explore the said strategic decisions, we need to get ourselves acquainted with competitive intelligence. That is where we come to learn that competitive intelligence can be defined as simply being business intelligence that is collected with the objective of enhancing competitive advantage. It can also be described as business intelligence that has the capability SWOT analysis reports to yield competitive advantage (whether or not it is actually collected with the objective of enhancing such competitive advantage). The latter description is important, because we often seen people holding competitive intelligence in their hands, yet being unable to figure out its potency. The intelligence in question is normally with respect to emerging opportunities and threats. Early awareness of emerging opportunities or threats can yield competitive advantage (and that is a well known fact). Contrary to what many people may imagine, collection of competitive intelligence is not just a matter of espionage (as is the case with, say, the collection of security intelligence). In fact, strictly speaking, there is very little espionage in the collection of competitive intelligence. Most of the literature we have on competitive intelligence best practices actually seems to be against any form of covert espionage. For the most part, competitive advantage is obtained through straightforward (but careful) observation of trends, and then figuring out what they are likely to translate into in the future. Simple things like newspaper articles touching on political events can end up being rich sources of competitive intelligence. The usefulness of the intelligence obtained is likely to depend to a large extent on whether its collection is done with adherence to competitive intelligence best practices, and how well inferences are made from the raw information gathered. Now as we said earlier, there are four types of strategic decisions you can make using competitive intelligence insights. Those include: