Set up a competitor tracking system using a knowledge base

Keeping track of your competitors is an essential exercise:

• in the company's traditional markets;

• on the innovative sectors in which the company wishes to move.

The aim here is to identify and monitor all the players operating in a given market, by analyzing the relevant information (e.g. country of origin, technology portfolio, projects undertaken, partnerships, etc.).

This combination of monitoring and capitalization creates a knowledge base that can be mobilized on a variety of occasions.

Real-time competitor tracking will therefore be useful for two types of deliverables:

• classic monitoring alerts, for example to produce a weekly/monthly newsletter or feed an RSS feed, or even an intranet site;

• progress reports (dashboard elements) for project teams, via a knowledge base (in Excel or another medium) which will classify all data retrieved.

It's this second type of deliverable that we'll detail here. We'll be using KB Crawl to collect the information, and Excel to create the knowledge base.