Data-Driven Competitor Intelligence Keeps You Ahead of the Competition

Companies that utilize internal innovation as the sole fuel for their research and development (R&D) find it hard to keep up with emerging industry trends. Open innovation, on the other hand, allows companies to be more agile and flexible. As an innovation strategy, open innovation encourages companies to seek collaborations with external agents, such as other companies or startups, to drive innovation. As part of innovation management, companies gather and analyze data on emerging technology trends, changing markets, and scientific advances. Another important source of data is competitor intelligence or simply monitoring what the competition is up to.

Regardless of the industry, companies are always in an arms race with others in their industry. No company can afford to innovate in isolation, oblivious to what its competitors are working on. In his military treatise The Art of War, ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu stressed that knowing your enemy is as important as knowing yourself. The principle is relevant to modern corporates as well.

What is Data-Driven Competitor Intelligence?

Competitor data is often unstructured and scattered across the web, chat, and paper-based documents. Analyzing this data manually requires a massive number of desk analyst hours and, moreover, the amount of data is exponentially increasing with each year. This is why businesses now use data-driven competitor intelligence to extract actionable insights on their competition from this data.

Some of the data sources that competitor intelligence tools utilize include:

• Primary research: Surveys and interviews are the conventional source of all kinds of market research, including competitor intelligence. Nowadays, these take the form of social media polls or email campaigns.
• Competitor’s content channels: These days, most companies have some content strategy to advertise their products and services. Scanning a competitor’s websites, blogs, and social media accounts provides valuable insights into how they position themselves in the market.
• Patent monitoring: Analyzing patent databases allows you to find what technologies your competitors are investing in. A broader search reveals emerging technologies in your industry.
• Industry reports: Governments, consulting companies, nonprofits, and think tanks regularly put out industry projections. Often, these provide an overview of where an industry is headed and may name your competitors, including those you may not be aware of yet.

By analyzing data from these and other sources, competitive intelligence allows you to identify priority areas for your innovation strategy.

How Competitor Intelligence Drives Innovation

But no matter how efficient a company’s processes are, there’s always another company or a startup that does some things just a little better. By revealing these improvements, competitor intelligence drives innovation. Some of the benefits of data-driven competitor intelligence include:

Leverage Data-backed Projections

In a way, innovation management is all about managing uncertainty in a fast-changing technology landscape. To develop their open innovation management strategies, companies must rely on projections. A large part of this includes analyzing what the competitors are doing since the end objective of the process is to gain a competitive advantage. Data-driven competitor intelligence uses this data to inform a company’s future projections of its industry’s ecosystem. This improves the likelihood of future success while staying within budgets.

Improve Marketing and Sales Intelligence

As discussed above, competitors’ content channels are an important source of information on them. A specific application of this knowledge lies in improving marketing and sales processes. When there isn’t much of a difference between products from two companies on a technological basis, it’s the one with better marketing that often prevails. Looking at how other companies, as well as startups, market their products provides new perspectives. Adopting best practices from competitors is a fast lane to success in optimizing both marketing and sales processes.

Optimize Supply Chains

Companies in the same industry often source raw materials or components from the same regions. Even minor improvements in supply chain efficiency can make the difference between weeks and days and, subsequently, between market leaders and followers. For instance, by moving production closer to Asia where other fast fashion brands sourced their raw materials too, Zara was able to establish market leadership fairly rapidly. As in marketing, adopting best practices from competitors enables optimization of supply chains.

Partner with Innovative Startups

For a large company, startups – not other large companies – are their biggest competitors. This is simply because of their sheer, ever-increasing numbers these days; something that wasn’t true a few decades back. This is why competitor intelligence now requires monitoring the startup ecosystem as well. Data-driven startup scouting identifies startups that can support a company’s innovation goals. Among other benefits, it accelerates product development and opens up new revenue channels.

When looking at startup-enabled innovation, competitor intelligence provides a comprehensive picture of emerging startups in your industry.

Leverage Data for Competitor Intelligence

A data-driven approach takes the hassle out of scanning the competitive landscape and provides insights that best align with your innovation ambitions. It gives you actionable insights from billions of data points from disparate sources. Using Big Data & AI, the StartUs Insights Discovery Platform analyzes firmographic data to map your competitive landscape and make it accessible.

Depending on your innovation goals and requirements, we offer a range of deliverables for your deep technology scouting process. Some of these include:

• Startup Database: Covers hundreds of relevant startups that match your innovation goals.
• Technology Map: Visualizes emerging technologies and their applications being developed by startups and companies in your field of interest.
• Technology Report: Provides firmographic data and insights on highly relevant startups, companies, and the technologies they develop.

With data-driven competitor intelligence, you receive comprehensive firmographic data on your existing and emerging competition.

To discover how we at StartUs Insights monitor your competition, we offer a free consultation. If you want to quickly derive innovation insights from your competition, get in touch today!