How Data-driven Market Intelligence drives Innovation

Companies today exist in a far more competitive market than companies of even a few decades back. Digitalization is a major factor behind the boom in startup activity, further increasing the competition. With different kinds of data available online, businesses have access to a wealth of information on the market players and forces. Translating this information into insights, however, is incredibly difficult as much of the information is unstructured, scattered, and noisy. Data-driven market intelligence converts information overload into actionable insights.

Components of Market Intelligence

Market intelligence tools analyze data on all participants and emerging trends. This provides a holistic overview of the market, allowing companies to identify disruptive development earlier. In turn, this allows companies to stay agile and respond quickly to threats and opportunities alike. Read about the impact of market intelligence on intelligence, from the perspective of three key stakeholders as well as from a macro perspective:

Competitor Intelligence

This aspect of market intelligence monitors activity related to competing companies and emerging startups and scaleups. Competitor intelligence uses data from surveys, competitors’ websites and social websites, and industry reports, among other sources. This provides data-backed projections on which trends the startup’s competition is focusing on. In turn, this allows companies to decide how to innovate while staying competitive.

Impact of Competitor Intelligence on Innovation

• Identifies emerging startups to partner with, thereby absorbing some of the competition
• Optimizes supply chains by improving on the competition’s supply chains
• Improves sales and marketing intelligence by incorporating best practices from the industry

Product Intelligence

This aspect of marketing intelligence looks at optimizing all aspects of the product lifecycle. For example, it gathers data on competitors’ products and disruptive technologies. This allows you to check if your manufacturing processes can be made more efficient. Further, it tracks how your products perform in the market and the factors that influence their performance.

Impact of Product Intelligence on Innovation

• Speeds up product innovation by using market feedback in product design
• Improves quality control and testing because of greater monitoring of production metrics
• By lengthening product lifetime, it provides companies with a competitive advantage

Customer Intelligence

Since companies sell through multiple channels, customer data is also scattered across different vendors and suppliers. Customer intelligence brings this data together and derives actionable insights from it. Mapping the entire customer journey allows companies to enhance the customer experience across all touchpoints. This improves customer retention and engagement. In highly competitive markets, customer experience is often a key differentiator between companies with similar products or services.

Impact of Customer Intelligence on Innovation

• Improves customer segmentation based on different demographic factors as well as customer lifetime value (CLV)
• Enables customer-based innovation that integrates value creation for customers with product development

Environmental Scanning

Data-driven environmental scanning analyzes as many variables as possible about the environment a company operates in. This goes beyond emerging technologies and startups to micro- and macro-level economic conditions. It also factors in geo-political events, the impact of climate change, and regulatory developments, among others. It makes companies more ready for opportunities and resilient to threats.

Impact of Environmental Scanning on Innovation

• Improves organizational efficiency by identifying weak points in internal processes
• Enables proactive threat management by monitoring the landscape for disruptive startups and technologies
• Increases market adaptability of businesses, allowing them to quickly match production to changing consumer needs

Benefits of Data-driven Market Intelligence

Market intelligence provides a range of benefits. Some of these include:

• By providing a holistic, near real-time view of the market, it improves the prediction of market trends
• A better understanding of internal and external opportunities provides companies with a competitive advantage
• By engaging customers across more touchpoints, data-driven market intelligence improves customer retention and their value to a business
• Allows managers to design more effective sales and marketing strategies, improving the quality and conversion of leads
• By closely monitoring any changes to a market environment, it minimizes compliance and regulatory risk

Use Market Intelligence to drive Innovation

Data-driven approaches are reinventing how companies approach market intelligence. Such approaches take the hassle out of scanning the billions of data points from disparate sources and provide insights that advance your innovation goals. The StartUs Insights Discovery Platform analyzes firmographic data on over 2,5 million startups to identify the best startups and technologies for your needs. Some of our services 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.

Data-driven market intelligence provides detailed info on everything that impacts your business, including other companies and emerging startups.