In order to excel as a technical organization it’s imperative to have good business competitive intelligence to understand both the business and technology environments. Without this understanding the best projects for commercialization will not be picked and project teams cannot be resourced appropriately to deal with competitive efforts.

The “Cultural Adaptation Model Dimensions” figure provides anchored scales from levels 1 to 5 for assessing competitive intelligence efforts. There are five categories in which competitive intelligence is assessed. These are use, awareness, needs, collection and dissemination, and champions. Organizations operating at level III or below are strongly disadvantaged in their innovation efforts.

The “Business Competitive Intelligence Questionnaire” figure provides almost 100 detailed questions for assessing competitive intelligence efforts in a comprehensive manner. Companies with strong competitive intelligence programs answer yes to all these questions. These questions can be used both as an overall scorecard metric (output metric) and from an “In-Process” perspective, used to identify gaps in performance that need to be addressed.