From the Lab to the Loading Dock Blog

A Community of Practice (CoP) connects like-minded colleagues who come together to share experiences and knowledge. Read on to find out how this concept was applied at SRC when a large group of people wanted to work on their project management certifications.

The business world is hearing buzzwords, such as “Competitive Intelligence,” “Market Intelligence,” “Business Intelligence” and others similar in nature, more often these days. For the most part, these words all tend to refer to the same general practice of a formalized “intelligence function.” But practitioners, and the organizations who have such functions, tend to attach different meanings to these phrases. Why is that? And if a company doesn’t have such a function, is the intelligence piece missing?

Saskatchewan’s Competitive Intelligence community has been rapidly gaining ground in the past year or so, with interest spreading across various organizations. We have the potential in Saskatchewan to create a Collaborative and Integrated network of practitioners who are proactively working together to understand the challenges we face, now and in the future.

Can and should small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) do competitive intelligence (CI)? If so, how do SMEs create a CI program without exhausting resources?

If you are part of a small company, you know that often your best analyst is you. Understanding how well your initiatives are doing in the market is not always clear, and knowing how far you’ve come is hard to reflect on. So what are some ways we can fill this knowledge gap?