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Competitive Intelligence (CI) Blog

Using Competitive Intelligence Data

The first thing that you need to know is that CI will not be able to help your company unless and until it changes the way it looks at its industry, the world and its position in it.

CI can only help those companies willing to look at their industry and the world strategically, making decisions that are unique and unlikely to be copied by other companies. Using CI to look for industry best practices, for example, will only allow your company to be a copycat of one of your competitors – it does not make you unique or stronger or successful.

The standard areas that CI has been used to develop strategic policies involve such issues as:

-          Innovation and product development
-          Customer service management
-          Operations planning and control
-          Purchasing, supplier and distribution development
-          Quality management
-          Attraction, development and retention of people

But these are unique times in human history and the old paradigms no longer apply.

For example, if your company uses petroleum-based products or is highly dependent on petroleum-based fuels, then the future looks quite bleak. Whether you accept the concept of Peak Oil or believe strongly in the abiotic origin of petroleum, you cannot escape the fact that petroleum is getting harder to find and extract, and is often found in very small deposits. Some sources of petroleum, like the tar sands in western Canada or shale oil, need large amounts of energy and resources (water, natural gas and other chemicals) to create useable oil; and the process is incredibly destructive of the environment. And one day it may become economically unfeasible to drill for oil. Your company may take measures to use less petroleum but the best such a policy can do is delay the day of reckoning.

In this scenario, CI can be used to look for and evaluate technologies or resources that can replace petroleum as a source of fuel and raw materials (like plastic). There are many creative and under-funded companies and research centres in the world that may be developing the technologies and resources to take us into the next stage of human history. Investing in such companies can make your company the leader in the post-petroleum era economy.

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