Creativity, Curiosity & Involvement
Creativity is an essential part of product innovation and strategy development. Therefore, it is, or at least should be an important part of industry analysis, competitor understanding, and customer understanding, and intelligence operations in general.
Competence: A basic requirement for developing images about the present and the future, industry experiences, knowledge of formal analysis models, information collection capability are all parts of the features of competence. This paper argues, however, that it is not enough.
Creativity: Creative thinking as a way of finding new solutions to old problems is stressed as one way of improving the ability to analyse and understand the business environment.
Curiosity: Curiosity is a key ingredient in shaping images of the future. It is an aid in the pursuit of knowledge from new sources and it helps reflect on the market signals that we see. Do they indicate change? Do they indicate novelty? Or is it just business as usual?
Communication & interaction: Workshops and seminars in forms of War Games and scenario thinking are all ways of developing images of the present and the future in a coordinated and shared framework, often much more powerful than the lonely analyst collecting industry information from open sources and applying standard analytical methods.
There are numerous books filled with analytical models that are supposed to help the analyst reach some of the objectives above. Examples of these are SWOT analysis, industry structure analysis, benchmarking, positioning analysis, extrapolation and trend analysis, to name but a few. Applying these models strictly might, however, not always lead to success, sometimes even leading to a negative result.
Examples of disadvantages
- Paralysis by analysis – you loose time that should be spent making decisions when you are too preoccupied looking for information.
- Relying on past experience – the models have been developed for problems identified in the past. The existing/future problems might be different from the historical ones.
- Limitation of the scope and focus of the model(s) – each model only focuses on a limited part of the business environment.
- Over-confidence – you believe that you know your business environment perfectly having applied one or more analytical models (and having done it over a long period of time)
The Global Intelligence Alliance (GIA) is a global network of business research and Competitive Intelligence (CI) consulting companies. The series of GIA White Papers is a means for the GIA and its clients and partner companies to share knowledge on key topics within the field of Competitive Intelligence. Please feel free to give us feedback on the White Papers by sending email to info@globalintelligence.com.
Free Download White Paper “Creativity, Curiosity & Involvement” (.pdf 2.1MB)