Designing Analytical Approaches for Interactive Competitive Intelligence

1.1. Motivation

Competitive intelligence (CI) is turning external, unorganized data about the competitive environment into strategic, useful insights. It is the basis for strategic decisions of a company. While CI is already an established topic in research and industry, within the last years two major shifts have emerged and are challenging the state of the art. First of all there is the rise of smart services and service-orientation in all industries which challenges the CI methods for product-oriented industries. Secondly there is the rise of big data (Manyika et al., 2011; McKinsey, 2012) which opens the way to new dimensions of scalability and speed but also failures. Both shifts are driving the development towards interactive competitive intelligence (iCI) for service industries.

In this paper we demonstrate by examples within our case “IP Industry Base” how interactive CI for service-oriented sectors can be implemented. In the underlying conceptual framework we combine Herrings’ concept of Key Intelligence Topics (KIT) (Herring, 1999) with the concept of objects known from the interaction theory.

This allows the user to visualize, compare, retrieve and analyse companies based on their service profiles in a constructive and scalable way. These artefacts are used as boundary objects for all stakeholders in continuous, collaborative analyses of the competitive environment.

1.2. Research Approach

The aim of the research presented in this paper is designing a conceptual framework for interactive competitive intelligence systems, as well analytical approaches to be implemented in these systems. To achieve this goal we followed the principles of Design Science Research (DSR) (Pfeffers et al., 2007). The Design Science Research Methodology aims to generate problem-solving artefacts as a result of a well-defined research process. In order to validate the introduced framework for interactive competitive intelligence we demonstrate the implementation of concrete analysis in our case “IP Industry Base”.

The remainder of this article provides the following contributions. In chapter 2 the conceptual framework for interactive competitive intelligence systems is introduced, based on an analysis of the shortcoming of current CI practices and systems. Chapter 3 introduces the analytical approach “service profiling” in order to demonstrate the application of the framework. With this example we show, how new methods and approaches for competitive intelligence can be designed and implemented in a structured way, governed by the conceptual framework introduced in the first step. The last chapter provides a short outlook.