“Can you do research and tell me what my key intelligence topic should be?” was a request from a market intelligence analyst to us recently. What he was actually saying, is that he needs pointers on what trends or developments will be relevant to his company going forward, so that he can focus on them and prepare for them now. He wants to identify relevant “weak signals”.

All new trends/ patterns/ macro changes in  technologies, society, economy, etc. start with small shifts in…

The CI “taxi driver syndrome”.

How often does the market and competitive intelligence team get requests without any further background information why the stakeholder needs that particular information?

For instance you get the question: How many PC’s are there in Austria?

If you than reply by asking: “why do you want to know this?” the response might very well be: “Just give me the data. I need it. Rather today than tomorrow”.…