Competitor reviews are standard practice in industrial research but collaboration is often ignored or slipped into the footnotes. Why not formalise a process for the Collaborator Review as a stage of your research of at least equal importance to competitors?
Writing a research plan for a strategic tender last week, I was struck with a familiar pang of awkwardness when I added a competitor review to the process. Competition is an ugly word but it has real-world, often productive, manifestations. It is essential to good strategy in products, marketing, business planning, etc. Next time, however, I want to include a collaborator review to complete the circle. Below is a sketch of how such analysis might be conducted.
Starting from the competitor review process
Depending for whom it’s conducted, I would approach a competitor review more or less along the following lines.
| Your Organisation/Project | Competitors | Research |
Choose relevant attributes to assess, eg:
|
Research (probably desk-based) your competitors’ assets and practices with respect to the list of attributes on the left. | Qualitatitve and/or quantitative data on:
|
The principle aim of a competitor review is to inform your market positioning. It should guide you on what strengths to play to and what parts of the industry to avoid competing on.
Defining the collaborator review
What might fundamentally set collaborative apart from competitive analysis is that competitors indicate the market gaps to be filled by your offering, whereas collaborators are sourced to fill the gaps in your offering. Thus, just as your strengths are leveraged to beat the competition, both your weaknesses and strengths are supported by co-operative agents.
So, that table again, adapted for collaboration:
| Your Organisation/Project | Collaborators | Researchers |
Choose relevant attributes to assess, eg:
|
Research (desk-based and in-person) your competitors’ assets and practices with respect to the list of attributes on the left. | Qualitatitve and/or quantitative data on:
|
Following such a review, the obvious next step is to plan your approach to your collaborative community, if I can call it such. Meeting them is essential but you can go into that process armed to the hilt with:
- A tailored elevator pitch
- Packaged products/services (ie. brochure content, positioning, etc.)
- Team personae and a working environment that are conducive to friendly interaction
Busting the Fear of Competitors
Finally, mention must be made of the growing middle ground between competition and collaboration. Whenever I’ve seen agents from competitive organisations opening up to each other and sharing intelligence, I’ve seen shared progress. Viewing competitors as potential allies is liberating. It can accelerate the evolution of an entire industry, or drive a cluster of allies within an industry at-large to take on the big players.
One of my favourite social media case studies, How The Roxy Became the #1 Venue on Twitter, quotes the term “co-opetition” (the nerdy contraction of competition and co-operation). Wikipedia’s definition of co-opetition is as a neologism for “when companies work together for parts of their business where they do not believe they have competitive advantage and where they believe they can share common costs” and suggests that “companies save money on shared costs while remaining fiercely competitive in other areas”. Well, quite.
It’s rather obvious really, let’s all be friends.