Which new technology deserves to be investigated? Which competitor needs close watching so you don’t get overtaken?
What major behavioral shift should be anticipated to adapt your offering?
With effective strategic intelligence monitoring, you’ll be able to answer all these questions, and therefore spot both opportunities and threats in time.
STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE MONITORING: WHY IS IT ESSENTIAL TO ORGANIZE IT WELL?
A bit of history…
In 2008, traditional taxi companies failed to detect, in the development of smartphone apps, a potential threat that a few months later would take the name… Uber, and introduce a genuine disruption in urban passenger transport.
Who knows whether the most agile of them could have turned the threat into an opportunity, created their own platform and taken the leap into these new technologies more quickly, and so better withstood this new competition… or even nipped it in the bud.
By focusing too much on their own line of business and without an effective strategic-intelligence-monitoring setup, most of the major taxi companies simply found themselves unable to anticipate a threat that, as is increasingly often the case across all fields, came from a very distant technological (or economic) world.
As this example illustrates, the challenge of strategic intelligence monitoring is to detect, early enough, a new form of competition or the rise of a promising technology, in order to allow an action plan (or counter-plan) to be deployed, with a view to maintaining or strengthening one’s competitive advantages. A threat identified in time most often also takes the form of a potential opportunity.
Weak signal: how do you avoid missing it in your strategic intelligence monitoring?
In itself, a weak signal is neither positive nor negative. It’s just a piece of information.
Most often insignificant and barely noticeable to most people. It takes on its full importance when it intersects with other information, or when it is amplified by the intuition or curiosity of an observer or a working group. (“Did you say working group?” Yes, we’ll come back to that…)
Detected in time, a weak signal can open the way to real strategic opportunities. Conversely, if it is not identified in time, or the right conclusions aren’t drawn from it, the same weak signal can conceal a threat, because a competitor is left free to seize it.
STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE MONITORING: A 360° VIEW OR MORE?
Strategic intelligence monitoring is a composite form of monitoring. It brings together all the types of monitoring that need to be organized at the heart of an organization: competition, market, regulation, geopolitics…
Strategic intelligence monitoring is also multidimensional, in that the depth and precision of the expected information can vary enormously from one topic to another.
This organization can prove complex. Faced with the multiplicity of issues, the fields to be watched, but also internal clients who don’t expect the same deliverables… It’s easy to lose your way, or worse, to end up producing a pile of reports, feeds and tables… that nobody reads.
Sometimes very focused and precise, sometimes more diffuse and removed from the company’s daily life, strategic intelligence monitoring must allow the various decision-makers to make medium- or long-term decisions, based on a “Probability” vs. “Impact” or “Imminence” vs. “Risk” matrix.
Not to mention compliance aspects, the major difficulty for a strategic-intelligence-monitoring unit is to carry out, on one hand, broad, superficial monitoring (for example on macro trends), and on the other hand, highly precise monitoring (for example on competitors). On top of that, it regularly has to carry out frequent surveys — deep dives — to dig deeper into a detected signal.
Without a monitoring plan reviewed very regularly, your monitoring unit can quickly lose its way…
Likewise, it is necessary to carry out after-action reviews of situations where information deemed important in hindsight was detected too late. Or where information was indeed disseminated, but did not trigger a particular reaction or alarm. The diagnosis and the resulting action plans will probably not be the same. It may sometimes mean reviewing the scope of a monitoring effort, and in other cases adapting how the fruits of that monitoring are disseminated and strategically enriched.
SOME COMPONENTS OF STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE MONITORING
This really is monitoring across the entire scope of the company’s radar. But the level of precision sought will not be the same when covering competitor monitoring (their product pipelines, their patent filings) as when following start-up news (emergence, fundraising, POCs, partnerships…) or tracking megatrends such as inflation, climate change, geopolitical or sociological shifts…
We won’t list them all in this article, but among the essentials of strategic intelligence monitoring, these are the types of monitoring to think of first.
Competitive intelligence monitoring: direct … and indirect
This is the most instinctive type of monitoring: closely watching production techniques, product or project pipelines, acquisitions, and patent filings
What new products / services are your competitors about to launch? What technologies is their R&D department working on? Who are their new academic partners, what theses are they funding, what collaborative projects are they taking part in?
From a “competition” angle, your strategic-intelligence-monitoring work must allow you to answer all these questions.
Also read – Technology intelligence monitoring: definition and practical guide
Market intelligence monitoring and long-term trends
Beyond classic competitive intelligence monitoring, good strategic intelligence monitoring needs to be able to step outside its own area of expertise.
Megatrends (or critical constants, for some)
It’s not just about sensing the zeitgeist to anticipate the next big trends.
It’s first and foremost about identifying scenarios, categorizing them in a matrix (for example: Probability vs. Impact on the company’s operations) and launching as many sector-based or thematic analyses (“deep dives”) as needed.
This type of monitoring is meant to feed strategic foresight thinking.
It involves choosing themes, broad areas of monitoring, generally of a global scope, but that could eventually have an impact on the company and its business model. They are not meant to try to predict the future. But it is indeed a foresight exercise. They can be enriched with various types of work, such as those proposed by Ariel Kyrou in Les imaginaires du futur, which raises the question of the future through works of science fiction.
Here are a few examples of this type of monitoring:
For example, keeping an eye on the latest innovations specific to the metaverse. If its use were to develop, it could indeed be worthwhile for a cosmetics brand to have its foundations, eyeshadows and other lipsticks tested on our avatars. And if a technology made it possible to add a scent dimension to the metaverse, a perfume brand would do well to make sure its fragrances are among the first that can be “digitally” smelled.
Another example in the cosmetics field: in recent years, the questioning of gender stereotypes has been a weak signal allowing brands to offer new makeup product propositions.
In a completely different field, the inflation our economies are experiencing can also be seen as a key long-term monitoring topic. If the rise in prices turns out to be lasting (which is likely), it could indeed profoundly transform consumption habits, giving rise to new patterns of consumption, communication, travel, banking usage, and so on.
Climate change is also one of these major trends capable of upending the economy at every level. Worth noting on this topic: for the first time in 2021, the CIA’s annual threat report (Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World)
Start-up monitoring
The Uber and taxi example makes it clear: you don’t operate in a vacuum, and innovation from a sector completely different from your own can have major repercussions on your business.
For example, a biochemistry start-up’s discovery of new catalysts to convert CO2 into formic acid — a molecule used in fuel cells — can be decisive for a company in the automotive industry.
Do you have a list of high-potential start-ups or SMEs relevant to your business?
And effective monitoring of the emergence of new start-ups (accelerators, incubators, fundraising…)?
If so, how often do you update the information about them? This question is not trivial, because you may well end up managing a mass of varied information whose relevance rate can sometimes fall below 10%…. It’s best to have a solid method and solid tools before getting started or acquiring an online database.
Thanks to the “Start-up” module of our TKM software platform, access a database of more than 220,000 start-ups around the world and follow their business news. What’s more, our software automatically detects new start-ups for you.
Standards, competition, digital shifts, societal changes, deep economic currents… The whole challenge of strategic intelligence monitoring is not to spread yourself too thin, nor, conversely, to stay blind to entire swaths of your environment. To achieve this, it’s worth thinking through how your strategic intelligence monitoring is organized. Ideally, this work should be organized by a dedicated unit, which will coordinate the network of thematic watchers (science, competitors, standards and regulations, labor law…) and establish an overall monitoring plan.
To carry out this strategic-intelligence-monitoring work as well as possible, you need tools that let you cover the various scopes described above. Patents, scientific articles, collaborative projects, theses, web articles
TKM Platform lets you monitor every field you need, without getting lost in the mass of existing information. With our tool, you’ll be able to classify, detect and comment on every piece of information, giving you everything you need to avoid missing a decisive weak signal.
Would you like to learn more?