Digitized business models combined with the growth in Venture Capital fund sizes and secondary markets placement volumes now mean that new offerings can be created and distributed faster than ever before. A new idea today can be made real within 1-2 quarters and distributed globally within a year. As a consequence local organizations now need to not only keep an eye on their local competitors but increasingly vigilant eye on global competitors who could enter their market within the next 12-24 months. Global competition is increasingly not a question of if but when.

The most challenging time to understand competition is when attempting something new. Creating a new offering, undertaking a new research project, or entering a new market demands a proper awareness of the current state. So much depends on rapidly understanding the landscape to ensure that the tight questions are asked, the right assumptions are capture and investment decision are made fully cognizant of potential threats and opportunities. Get this right and effort then resources can be well spent pursing something that can succeed, get it wrong then it is highly likely that time and money will be wasted pursuing something that will ultimately fail.

The combination of digital, increasingly scalable, global business models and the need to increasingly invest in innovating to create new offerings and access new unfamilar markets means that organizations must now significantly increase their scanning capability to rapidly and continuously detect, understand and evaluate what is happening across multiple fronts. The simple facts are that good ideas are cheap, competition is more global and better funded than ever before and that making better informed strategic choices is now critical to succeed.

We believe that organizations need to enact process that afford the ability to create, validate and refine strategy on a continuous basis.

We further contend that this ability will be essential for

1. properly understanding the competitive landscape and challenges that need to be overcome to successfully enter new markets, and
2. ensuring positive returns on the investments made to create new products, offerings and technologies by minimising the uniformed pursuit of low-to-no probability of success options during the initial planning stages of a project.