We live in an age of innovation, with evolving digital technologies wed to new ways of managing people and creating value. That places pressure on business across the spectrum to innovate, making an agile, responsive corporate innovation strategy crucial in today’s highly competitive and fast-paced business environment. However, there’s no point making bad decisions quickly. Pace needs to go hand-in-hand with sound information and insights. 

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That’s the goal of market intelligence, which takes a structured approach to collecting, analyzing, and managing market data. While other forms of business intelligence focus on internal operations, market intelligence looks at external factors like customers, competitors, products, and market and technology trends, to deliver valuable insights for decision-making, innovation, and consulting teams. It is divided into four key areas: competitor intelligence, product intelligence, market intelligence, and customer intelligence, each of which offers essential insights that enable corporate innovation teams to predict market shifts, improve strategies, and cultivate greater customer loyalty. 

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Where market intelligence and innovation intersect

By providing access to data-driven insights on these key areas, market intelligence solutions lends itself well to corporate innovation in a number of ways. 

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Identifying and monitoring emerging technologies

Market intelligence can identify new or on-the-horizon technologies that could be leveraged to create products or services. Keeping abreast of technological advancements can also help corporate innovation teams identify organizations with similar goals or business approaches, creating the opportunity for partnership and collaboration.

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Anticipating changes in the market landscape 

Changes in company or competitor direction can serve as useful indicators of societal and consumer behavior changes. As market intelligence is designed to track these sorts of changes, it can provide valuable insights to innovation teams tasks with anticipating future needs and preferences. This is useful for both new product design and identifying novel applications for existing products and technologies. 

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Supporting long-term strategic planning

Market intelligence is useful for understanding which business and market trends are actually sustainable, helping innovation teams decide if these align with long-term company strategy, while also providing insights for risk mitigation strategies. 

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Enhancing research and development

Research and development is expensive, so it’s important to ensure efforts are focused on relevant, high-impact areas. By identifying and examining long-term market trends, market intelligence provides critical insights to guide this process, along with ensuring the long-term viability of products and services developed. 

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Exploring new opportunities

Beyond new products and services, innovation teams are tasked with identifying untapped markets. Comprehensive market information is obviously essential in this regard, as it is for finding other new opportunities, including partnerships, emerging technologies, or relevant trends. 

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Supercharging corporate innovation

Digging deeper, we find that market intelligence solutions can aid corporate innovation teams in seeing through the noise, boosting collaboration, scouting, crisis response, and strategic direction. 

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Collaborations and partnerships

The COVID-19 threw into sharp focus what savvy procurement officers had known for a long time: that cooperation and relationship building with suppliers and partners unlocks new sources of value that go beyond price negotiations. Beyond the resilience that closer partnerships bring to supply chains, collaborating with suppliers on an ongoing basis, companies can develop innovations that serve emerging customer needs, creating value for all parties.

Market intelligence plays an essential role in strategic planning around partnerships. It provides innovation teams with a clear view of market conditions, emerging technologies, customer needs, and competitive dynamics, helping them to figure out how to find start-ups and incumbents alike for potential long-term collaboration. This has a number of benefits: 

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Culture alignment is the basis of sound partnerships. By highlighting potential partners’ corporate cultures and values, market intelligence helps businesses understand who is a good fit for their long-term strategy. 

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Market intelligence helps identify synergies with other businesses, revealing complementary capabilities and potential weaknesses that need to be taken into consideration. 

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Comprehensive data is needed to set and monitor performance metrics for partnerships, including innovation benchmarks and market share growth. 

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Any partnership carries with it a host of risks. Market intelligence helps evaluate risks, uncovering regulatory challenges or competitive threats. 

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It provides a holistic view of the market to determine the best market positioning for a partnership. 

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Technological scouting

It’s hard to stay on top of the breakneck pace of technological innovation, but this is one of the major strengths of an effective market intelligence solution, which can continuously monitor relevant sources for news about research, breakthroughs, and product launches. This sort of information enables innovation teams to react as quickly as possible and tweak strategy to remain competitive. 

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Similarly, market intelligence services can monitor patent filings and publications across the world, identifying competitor strategies and innovations, along with potential infringements on your own patents. This sort of data informs market positioning, legal posture, research and development, and partnerships. 

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Crisis-driven innovation

“Never let a crisis go to waste,” the adage popularly attributed to Winston Churchill, rings perhaps truer now than ever before in a world still recovering from the shock of COVID-19 and grappling with resource scarcity and climate change. Market intelligence helps identify and prioritize those innovations that meet the specific challenges posed by crises, enabling organizations to swim where others might sink and unlocking new market segments. 

Being comprehensively informed also boosts business resilience. By understanding how their company relates to external conditions and trends, leaders are better equipped to make the sort of informed decisions that will see them emerge stronger from setbacks, rather than just recovering to where they were before. 

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Corporate innovation strategy

Truly innovative companies are those that consider not just the end product, but rather the value chain in its entirety – as it stands at present and in the anticipated future. Teams need comprehensive information about competitors, customers, markets, and business processes in order to understand how these can be changed to gain a competitive advantage. This is the perspective from which corporate innovation strategy should be developed, with new insights constantly fed into strategy, the impact of which feeds into market intelligence, creating a cycle of continuous information gathering and improvement. 

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Conclusion

Corporate innovation teams are under pressure to meet the evolving challenges of a rapidly changing world. They are responsible for identifying relevant emerging technologies, anticipating marketplace shifts, devising long-term strategies, guiding research and development, and exploring new opportunities. 

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By providing comprehensive data on customers, competitors, products, and trends, market intelligence empowers these teams to identify potential partnership opportunities, keep pace with technological developments, leverage crises to their advantage, and refine long-term strategy. Well-chosen market intelligence services are thus indispensable to the effectiveness of corporate innovation programs.

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Where Speeda Edge comes in

Speeda Edge provides comprehensive, verified market intelligence solutions to help inform corporate innovation strategies and a wealth of other business functions across 200 emerging sectors, backed up by teams of experienced analysts to provide deeper insights. To see how we can take your business to new heights of innovation, check out Speeda Edge’s fit for corporate innovation teams.