The Roadmapping is a tool to support strategy thinking that represents a time horizon of current and future products or services of a company and the difference options of technological expertise that can be developed or acquired in the future. These concepts must be aligned with the market needs and strategic challenges that drive them. Competitive Intelligence is an extremely important input when facing the realization of a Roadmap and this article will explain the relationship between them.

Measuring the Return on Investment (ROI) of the Competitive Intelligence activity is an ongoing issue that any candidate has had to face on occasion. Until recently, it was enough to mention the “intangible benefits” to justify the investment, but since the onset of the economic crisis organizations are much tougher with their spending and seek to justify it quantitatively. In this article we provide a study of the ROI of the CI both at qualitative and quantitative terms. This requires analyzing both the benefits and the costs associated with the activity of CI.

Last week we published an article in which we offered 7 reasons to outsource the Competitive Intelligence systematic. Still, as said, choosing this path is not ideal to launch a CI unit; outsourcing should be chosen only when there is no other option. These are the reasons that support this thesis:

When an organization assesses the possibility of implementing a Competitive Intelligence unit, it usual to have some doubts about the need to outsource the systematics of CI, i.e., hiring an external to feed and keep the system alive. Assuming that this is not ideal, there are cases where the circumstances recommend taking such decisions. This article gives 7 reasons to outsource CI: