Snooping On A Shoestring

from the well-of-course dept

Business 2.0 is running an article about the rough and tumble world of competitive intelligence. Apparently, these days, it's becoming more important to keep on top of what you're competitors are doing - but trying to do so under budget. Blatant self-promotion time: Of course, one simple way of doing this is to let Techdirt Corporate Intelligence do the work for you - or to augment existing internal programs. We've got great tools, processes, and people to do this much better and cheaper than any in-house solution - and with the advantage of an outside perspective. We provide our clients with all the daily news and analysis they need to know, and put it all into the blog format, for easy searching, sorting, annotating, and commenting. We go beyond other solutions (either internal or external) by providing both the technology and the human intelligence to create a solution that is tremendously useful. It's a solution that our clients say they can't live without. End of blatant self promotion. What's been most interesting to me, in growing the business over the past few years, is the difference in companies that really value competitive intelligence vs. those that think it can be done piecemeal or by some junior level person. Companies that value competitive intelligence - especially in a down market, have trememdous perspective on their market space, and seem to react much more quickly. At the same time, when you run across companies that either assume they know everything that goes on in the market already or that the Wall Street Journal will tell them everything they need to know, you notice a distinct lack of strategic initiative. This belief has been backed up by research into the topic as well. In an age where things are moving faster than ever, and you have a whole world to compete with (not just local companies), it's shocking to hear some companies believe they know everything they need to know.