This year’s Global Intelligence Association (GIA) conference "Towards World Class Market Intelligence" offered another opportunity to exchange market & competitive intelligence wisdom with to existing GIA customers. Also I was honoured to speak about "Executive Buy-In to Competitive Intelligence".

In a new format GIA ran several small workshops with groups of some 4-8 participants with different market intelligence topics (such as Market Intelligence for Strategic Planning, Market Intelligence for Customer Processes, Market Intelligence for Innovation and Product Life-Cycle Management, Setting up Market Intelligence Operations).

Other than last year’s roundtable discussions this format proved much more interactive and all participants I talked to demonstrated high satisfaction regarding their take-away’s this time around.

At the main event GIA’s CEO and cofounder Markko Vaarnas reviewed GIA’s business performance, offerings additions (of which the new Rapid Response Service sticks out as a new solutions offering) and outlook on future developments.

Afterwards Hans Hedin produced some results of the global CI survey (link) and moved on to introduce in great detail the matrix of a competitive intelligence function evolution or development.

As I have used the matrix at Ciba in an effort to move our CI function to the next level I used this programmatic, structured approach for mandating of all necessary improvement actions and activities which, at the same time, resulted in my presentation at the GIA event leading from Hans’ World Class CI Function approach to an actual utilization case study of this very matrix and approach.

As the last presentation that day my very good friend Michel Bernaiche of Dunkin’ Brands focused on a CI topic which is dramatically under-represented but needs more attention in the years to come: counter intelligence!

As many companies have been busy within the last years to establish, centralize or improve their competitive intelligence functions counter intelligence measures have not found the business mainstream just yet.

This year’s event found its socializing highlight in a trip with a two mast sail ship across the Helsinki bay. Find some photo’s of the event and the socializing fun at my personal blog.