MinimalStateCI Theory & Practice
NBN Study: Were the right questions asked?
Earlier this month, the Australian government released the implementation study for the National Broadband Network. The scope of the study was to: “advise Government on how best to implement its stated policy objectives, not to evaluate those objectives, given that the policies have already been agreed by Government. This report therefore focuses on translating high-level policy [...]
Kaggle, competitions and competitive intelligence
Today, economist and blogger Nicholas Gruen announced that he had become chairman of Kaggle.com. Kaggle is a service that allows companies to run data-modelling and prediction competitions. Two type of competitions are supported – competitions to predict the past and competitions to predict the future. “Predicting the past requires contestants to build models that are evaluated [...]
Smarter searching for all – Part 1
For most people , putting a few words into the standard Google search box is about as sophisticated as their searching gets. But in certain jobs, like competitive intelligence (CI), being able to go beyond basic searching is a critical skill. Earlier this year, smarter searching was one of the topics discussed at a get together [...]
In CI – better answers start with better questions
Competitive intelligence (CI) is a discipline with the potential to provide organisations with valuable insights in to how to perform better. But like most things, the quality of the output is influenced by the quality of the inputs. In CI, one of the key inputs is the questions that it is expected to answer. If [...]
What’s your competitors character?
What’s the character of your competitors? Are they Guardians or Idealists? What about the temperament of their leaders? Understanding the character of a company and it’s leaders is a useful way of distinguishing between what a competitor could do, versus what it is likely to do. For the CI practitioner, this is an extremely valuable [...]