SCIP Oregon

SCIP and PDMA Networking Event - Portland Beavers - August 19th..

Posted by campsean - 03/07/09 at 10:07:24 pm

Whether you are a baseball fan or not this will be a great chance to meet competitive intelligence, market research, and product marketing professionals who make up the membership of the Oregon SCIP Chapter and the PDMA.

Join us for a fun networking event when the Portland Beavers take on the Iowa Cubs the evening of August 19th. The networking will start at 6:15 and the event will be located in the event area above the left field wall at PGE Park. The cost for this event is $15 per person.

PGE Park
1844 SW Morrison Street

Directions
http://www.pgepark.com/stadium/location

Registration Fees: $15.00 for Members or Non Members.

Registration will close via the web Wednesday, August 12, 2009 (EDT).  If you are not able to meet the deadline, you will be able to register on site prior to 6:45pm.

Register here:
http://www.scip.org/Training/EventsDetail.cfm?itemnumber=7870

Events for 2009 - 2010 program year.

Posted by campsean - 21/05/09 at 12:05:25 am

Outside of our upcoming event on wargaming planned for June 9th I wanted to let you know about the dates for our events for the 2009 - 2010 program year.

•  August 19th 2009 - Networking Event - Portland Beavers Game
• September 23rd 2009 - Panel Discussion
• November 17th 2009 - Panel Discussion - In conjunction with the Willamette MBA Program
• January 19th 2010 - Panel Discussion
• April 6th 2010 - Panel Discussion
• June 8th 2010 - Panel Discussion

CI links from April Chapter Meeting

Posted by campsean - 25/04/09 at 08:04:20 pm

During the April meeting we pulled together a variety of sites and resources to use when gathering competitive intelligence.

Here is the full list.

People Searches:

Emailpattern.com – Look up the pattern that a company uses to assign email addresses.  If you know someone’s name, this helps you guess their email.

Pipl.com - look people up by name, email, Web nickname, or phone number.  Find out their other contact information and what social networks they’re a part of.

Linkedin.com – Find people for interview recruitment, determine where your employees have gone off to, use saved searches to receive alerts when new people go to work for competitors.

Search Engines

LexisNexis and Factiva are struggeling to index relevant content because they focus on publishing content, which is waning.  But, Factiva is only $70 per year, and there’s no additional charge for searching.  There is a $2 charge per article to view.  People report finding document titles on Factiva and then looking for those exact title with Google to save money.

Clusty is a meta-search engine that groups results into logically related clusters. 

Touchgraph visually shows how sites on the Web are related to other sites.

Archive.org – (a.k.a. “The Internet Wayback Machine”) keeps historical copies of Web pages, letting you see what products or services a competitor used to offer, or how their positioning has changed.

Books.google.com, scholar.google.com – Find people who have authored or been interviewed on various topics.  Useful to find candidates for qualitative research or subject matter background.   

Search for PDF or PPT file types under a company’s site to get more in-depth information.  Use wildcards to pick up subsidiaries which are more likely to leak information.  For example:

                positioning messaging filetype:pdf site:*.somecompany.*/*

www.google.com/alerts – monitor competitors and detect recent news.  Often lags breaking news by 24 hours.

bizjournals.com – backend site to all the business journals.  Small companies might make lot of news locally, but not show up in Google.

Silobreaker.com – Company information, leadership, connections to other people, news, etc.

Company Info

Finance.yahoo.com – company filings and other statistics, and investor message boards.

Hoovers.com – Company statistics, leadership, jobs, news, competitors, and other background information. 

Indeed.com – Search for company job postings across many jobs sites.

Glassdoor.com – Get information, for a company’s employees, about the company moral, culture, strengths and weaknesses, and salaries.

Seekingalpha.com – Has financial information and earnings call transcripts.

Delphion.com – patent search database

Innography.com – A startup with pricing better than Delphion.  Lets you search inventors, companies, etc. 

footnoted .org – Digs into the footnotes of financial filings

Allconferences.com – lets you know what conferences a competitor will attend as a sponsor or exhibitor.

Other

Web Site Monitoring Tools – A list of Web based and downloadable tools for monitoring Web sites for changes. 

Edgar-online.com – Company information, financial filings, and other company information

Twitter – Many competitor employees twitter important news, customer meetings, and other information that won’t show up in formal writings.  Said one CI professional, “I’ve been profoundly struck by the things I’ve discovered.” 

Tweetdeck, Digsby – let you view and manage your twitter streams.  Digsby also integrates with Linked-In.

Slideshare.net – Companies often post product or service pitch decks here.

Fedspending.org – Information about the business a competitor has done with the federal government.

http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm - makes “publish or perish” software that uses Google Scholar data to determine citation information.

Thefoundationcenter.org  – grant writing research

Quantcast.com – finding traffic and demographics for who’s going to certain web sites.  Only works for larger sites.

Software Tools

Traction software – tag articles and send information out daily to the right people in the organization.

June 9th - Wargaming Event - Noon to 4pm…

Posted by campsean - 16/04/09 at 11:04:07 pm

Oregon Chapter Meeting

Surprise!  How Business War Games Shock Strategists into Beating the Competition—an intensive half-day program where you participate in a genuine business war game!

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009      Jake’s Grill, Portland, OR     Noon – 4:00pm

Networking Event – 4:00pm to 6:00pm – Jake’s Grill

Program Description

What would you do if you were the GM CEO? Or Alan Mulally of Ford, Akio Toyoda of Toyota, Tom Purves of BMW, Robert Cosmei of Hyundai, or another industry leader? And not only what would you do, but how well would your strategies work?  Here’s your chance to find out. What’s more, here’s your chance to learn how to stress-test your strategies and anticipate your competitors with business war gaming. You might even have some fun while you’re at it. Not to mention the cool Top Strategist bragging rights, complete with official certificate and web-wide recognition, you and your team will secure if you win the war.

War games and simulations almost always lead to surprises. Why? Not because they have more decimal points or curvier demand curves. Rather, because they help us think better. They help us take competitors into account realistically, not optimistically.

They help us focus on cause and effect. They help us think things through and see the big picture. They help us learn to think strategically.

And while there are no sure things in life, business war games tilt the odds in your favor. That’s what happened for companies like British Airways, GlaxoSmithKline, Shell, Weyerhaeuser, and a couple dozen more around the world, when they worked with Advanced Competitive Strategies. You’ll get a taste of what they discovered in this special, hands-on, half-day session facilitated by Mark Chussil, ACS’ Founder and CEO (www.whatifyourstrategy.com), a veteran of 100 business war games and a frequent writer and speaker about business war-gaming.

Speaker

Mark Chussil

A highly rated, thought-provoking, and entertaining speaker, Mark lectures and consults around the world about strategic thinking, advanced business war games, and computer simulation. Mark has worked with ACS clients around the world, including Astra Merck, AT&T Wireless Services, Bell Atlantic (now Verizon), British Airways, DuPont, GlaxoSmithKline, Kodak, Methanex, Nortel, Novartis, Organon (Schering-Plough), Petronas, Shell, Sprint, Sprint PCS, USWEST (now QWEST), Weyerhaeuser, and others.  Mark earned his MBA from Harvard University and his BA from Yale University.

Location

Jake’s Grill

611 SW 10th Avenue

Portland, OR 97205

Phone: 503.220.1850

Directions

http://www.mccormickandschmicks.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=content.display&pageid=96&id=21

Registration Fees (Includes: Presentation, Full Breakfast & Networking)

SCIP Members - $35.00

Non-Members - $45.00

*Please Note* Registration will close via the web Monday, June 8, 2009 (EDT).  If you are not able to meet the deadline, you will be able to register on site.

To register, please click the link below:

http://www.scip.org/Training/EventsDetail.cfm?itemnumber=7156

Agenda

Breakfast and Program:  Noon to 4pm.

No Host Networking Event: 4pm to 6pm

Contact Information

Sean Campbell, Oregon Chapter Chair email, sean@cascadeinsights.com, 503.631.7552.

Robyn Reals, SCIP Education Manager, email, rreals@scip.org, 703.739.0696 x107.

Cancellation Policy

Cancellations not received in writing by Tuesday, June 2^nd, 2009, will not be refunded.  

April Event - When Time is Short: Best Practices for Gathering Intelligence via Web Based Tools

Posted by campsean - 27/02/09 at 08:02:32 pm

Our next face to face event is going to be on April 7th at Jake’s Grill at 8am.  As with previous events we’ll start with networking from 8:00am to about 8:20am and then move onto the event topic.  Details follow.

Registration link - http://www.scip.org/training/EventsDetail.cfm?itemNumber=6817

Sponsored by:  Traction Software- www.tractionsoftware.com

When Time is Short: Best Practices for Gathering Intelligence via Web Based Tools

The Internet provides a wealth of resources, well beyond Google, that competitive intelligence professionals use to gather information.  Join us for the April Oregon SCIP event, where panelists and attendees will share their best tools and techniques for gathering specific kinds of competitive information.

Learn how CI professionals use the Web to get details on the following:

• How have a competitor’s products or services evolved over time?

• Are they launching new strategic initiatives?

• Are they expanding into other geographies or industries?

• How are their products or services priced?

• Are they growing or shrinking in this economy?

• What tools to CI professionals use to organize and disseminate information throughout their organization?

The structure of this event is designed to allow attendees collaborate and network with each-other, as well as CI professional panelists, and share the best resources for acquiring competitive information.

Speakers

• Kathry Brost – Mentor Graphics
• Dennis Muscato – ATI Wah Chang
• Charlie Davidson – Attensa
• Sean Campbell - SCIP Oregon Chapter Chair and Principal of Cascade Insights

Moderator

• Roger Courville – 1080 Group

January Event - Upcoming Events - Committee Meetings

Posted by campsean - 05/02/09 at 09:02:35 pm

Thanks to all who attended the last event in January. It was a great success and we had a very solid crowd (25+).

Upcoming events include our next face to face event on April 7th, 2009 and upcoming committee meetings on February 17th and March 17th.

All committee meetings and events are at Jake’s Grill on 10th.

Feel free to attend committee meetings as they are open to all - regular committee member or not.

The Pricing Strategy Simulation

Posted by scottswigart - 02/02/09 at 05:02:53 pm

By Mark Chussil, Advanced Competitive Strategies, Inc.

Participants at the January 27 SCIP Oregon meeting faced a challenge. Three, actually. What pricing strategy should they implement in a fictitious ailing industry, mature industry, and fast-growth industry? And who, among the strategists, would win?

We gave each participant information about the industries in which their businesses would compete, and we asked each of them to design pricing strategies for their businesses. They could choose from strategies such as match the market average, cut, tit for tat, do whatever the most-profitable did, and many more, and they could select different strategies at different points in time. All told, they could choose among 14,739 combinations, in each industry, to find the strategies just right for their businesses.

Continue reading The Pricing Strategy Simulation…

First Bridge Chat - Audio and Deck

Posted by campsean - 03/01/09 at 12:01:57 am

Recently we held our first “bridge chat” with Mark S. Corcoran - CFA. The topic of the chat was Uncovering CI in Financial Statements. 

Attached to this post are the slides from the presentation as well as an audio stream of the chat.

We’ll be looking forward to our second bridge chat occurring sometime in February. 

Slides

Interview with Mark Asher - Competitive Intelligence Manager - Adobe

Posted by campsean - 29/12/08 at 04:12:04 pm

Interviewee: Mark Asher - Adobe

Interviewers:Sean Campbell and Scott Swigart of Cascade Insights

• Examples of how CI can fit into a larger organization
• Responding to corporate threats with CI planning
• Interacting positively with other parts of the business
• Ferretting out information about competitiors’ activities
• The roles of primary and secondary intelligence sources
• Tips and tricks for the CI practitioner
• Tactical versus strategic roles for the CI practice

Sean Campbell: Mark, tell us about yourself, your role at Adobe, and your experience with CI.

Mark: Sure; I have been at Adobe just under eight years, and I have held a number of different roles in product management, business operations, and now in competitive intelligence through the corporate development organization for about two years.

Our competitive intelligence practice has two main charters. The first of those is primarily to keep our management team aware of competitive developments across all of Adobe’s business thrusts and interests, as well as providing them with thoughtful implications and recommendations about how to react to those events as they occur.

In this context, events can be anything from earnings or product releases to acquisitions or major management shifts–pretty much any activity that impacts our interests. Most of that is backward looking, as you might expect. Something happens, and we provide thoughtful insight about it.

Continue reading Interview with Mark Asher - Competitive Intelligence Manager - Adobe…

Meeting Minutes - December Committee Meeting

Posted by campsean - 29/12/08 at 04:12:16 pm

Just wanted to get out a short post that contains some of the highlights from the last committee meeting.

Last Face to Face Event Feedback - Positive.

• Content was great.
• Some good nuggets, could have maybe used a little more information that people could use without the full modeling.  For example, “If something free enters the market, think about raising your price because everyone price sensitive has left.”
• Very solid attendence - 20+

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