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Competitive Intelligence is often also referred to as "business intelligence", or  taking an impartial look at your competition and the playing field on which you compete.  It can provide your business with a business multiplier to the aspects of  Market Research, Market Analysis , and Long-Range Planning. Competitive Intelligence is a specific analytical process that looks at various aspects of data from a given industry and transforms it into actionable assessments about the market environment, competitors' capabilities and intentions, and a firm's position and performance in that market environment. 

Competitive Intelligence looks not only at what the competition is doing or planning to do – based on overt information collection (and not the "spy vs spy" approach glamorized in the media) –, but also at the market environment in which a company and its competition operate.  The fusion of both your business' intentions with market environment allows decision-makers to make informed decisions regarding the future of your business. 

Consider: 

1. As you develop new products, are you concerned that your competitors might enter the market with a similar product -- perhaps just days before your do?
2. Do you worry about being blind-sided by a new technology or innovation that will make your present product or product-line obsolete?

This is where IRIS Enterprises can help.

Why do you need competitive intelligence information?  In part, it is to better understand your competitors, their capabilities and intentions, and how this plays out in the market environment you share with them. 

Competitive Intelligence can play a critical role in helping you to select strategic alliances in the marketplace or to select joint venture partners who can enhance your market position.  In this shrinking world of technological change it is harder for growing firms to remain self-reliant.  Alliances and ventures help spread the risk and enhance potential. 

You may want to enter a strategic alliance or joint venture to overcome barriers to entering the European Market.  IRIS Enterprises has the contacts and knows where to go to help you find the alliance or venture partners. 

You may ask: "Can't my small business do the competitive intelligence research and analysis itself?"  Of course you can.  But can you do it efficiently?  In the dynamically changing market environment of the end of the 1990s, it is essential for a business to keep pace with changes and to respond accordingly. 

However, most small-to-medium sized businesses are unable to gather critical competitive information about their market.  They have not developed a logical process for dealing with change -- both in the marketplace and in technology.  They can spend too much time (aka money) obtaining the wrong information.  Effective competitive intelligence must provide you with assessments you can act on and not historical information for your bookshelf. 

Successful businesses know their products, their market, the customer base, and the customers' perceptions of the product.  Competitive Intelligence is one of the facets of success in your business endeavors. It is the way you can understand your market environment and your place in that market.  This is critical to preclude failure.  Firms often fail because their were unable to respond to the rapid changes of their market environment. 

IRIS Enterprises can conduct competitive intelligence for your company and train people to do the work in the future. 

IRIS Enterprises is a consulting business for market research, market analysis, long-range planning, and their web applications (Webpage creation, process re-engineering, business planning, and market planning) in North America and Germany. We can help you stay ahead in a competitive marketplace – or gain the competitive advantage. 

We welcome your inquiries.

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