How is the watch tailored to each department?

Why start from decisions and not from sources?

Because the same news item is useful to one area and noise to another. According to UNE 166006, AENOR describes the purpose of watching as turning the systematic observation of the environment into knowledge for decisions at every level of the organisation^[1]. The standard, UNE 166006:2018, ‘R&D+i management: watch and intelligence system’, has been in force since April 2018^[2].

Competitive intelligence has formalised this starting point for decades. In 1999 Jan Herring proposed Key Intelligence Topics (KITs), obtained by interviewing those who make decisions and grouped into three types: strategic decisions and actions, early-warning topics, and key players (competitors, customers, suppliers or potential partners)^[3]. A well-defined department has few key topics, formulated as questions.

What is defined for each department, step by step

1. Decisions. What the area decides in the coming months: approving a supplier, opening a research line, adapting a product to a standard.
2. Key topics. The questions which, answered in time, would change those decisions.
3. Sources. Which type of source answers each question, and which primary source confirms it.
4. Urgency. What cannot wait, and what is enough to read in the usual newsletter.
5. Recipients and format. Who reads, with how much detail and how often.
6. Review criterion. How the area will know, after a few months, whether the watch has served it.

What each department needs: decisions and reference sources

The table describes common practices of the profession. Which sources go into each Innguma watch are defined with each organisation during set-up.

How this translates into Innguma

All areas work on the same platform, each with its own watches. Innguma monitors news and websites, patents, regulation and the BOE, tenders, competitors’ websites and specialist sources. Its AI filters, groups duplicates and classifies each signal by category, technology, entity, type of event, place and tone, so that each department’s filtering can rely on those dimensions. People decide what is watched, what is published and who receives it. What is validated stays in the Library, with its tags, comments and source, and newsletters for each area are sent from it, with summaries generated by AI.

Common mistakes when adapting the watch

• Copying another area’s configuration. Procurement and R&D may watch the same material with opposite questions: price and availability versus technical alternatives.
• One newsletter for everyone. If each reader has to search for what concerns them, they stop opening it.
• Measuring by volume. More signals do not make a better watch; what counts is whether any of them changed a decision.
• Not reviewing after the first results. An area’s questions change with its strategy, and the watch should change too.

How do you know whether the adaptation works?

With questions to the area, not with dispatch statistics: which decision was taken with information from the watch? Which external change arrived by another route before the newsletter? Which topic is redundant? The answers show which filters to refine, which sources to add and which topics to drop.