This article called Drivers tells us it’s more than just good questions describes what a driver is within Competitive Intelligence and how to use them to create insight.
You have some great questions, and you are researching and talking to people. Now you will find yourself swamped with information on paper, Evernote, email and your cloud. Then the realisation hits you that Intelligence is so much more than researching Google well — lots of data and no idea where to start.
It may sound simple, but the next step is to sort all the information into a limited number of piles. Then put them in order. The titles of these piles (or drivers as they a termed), the order they are to be classified and how we determine when we have big enough piles needs to be thought out and agreed. These drivers allow you to develop future actions and what you are doing is breaking the information you have found into smaller parts. So you can better analyse the information.
For example, if you are assessing a competitor’s strengths. You need a question like How serious a threat is this competitor to our market? Your drivers could include financials, product pricing, people, customers, future strategy, marketing message etc. A future action from products pile, for instance, could be “if our competitor introduces that product to that market we will… Or if our competitor increases their price by x, we will…
And then you are a little closer to Intelligence to help you make a decision. This article called drivers tell us it’s more than just good questions described what a driver is within Competitive Intelligence and how to use them to create insight.
