Let's talk a little bit about doing research in support of strategic analysis. This is a critical step in any robust strategic analysis. Think about your toolkit. Each one of the tools in the toolkit can be supported with further research and data. Be it a five forces analysis, a capabilities analysis or a portfolio planning matrices. What you need to do is you need to collect data to help establish facts and ultimately generate insights. Think about preparing a strategic analysis is almost like a legal briefing. You're making an argument at the end of the day. You're making recommendations about how the organization should move forward and you need to support that argument with data and facts when possible. Recognize a little research can go a long way. We can understand market trends by collecting different types of consumer data or market trend data. We can benchmark our competition as a way to understand the nature of the competition, the nature of the competitive environment we're operating in. And you can of course do a lot of research about your own internal organization. Ways to assess it, to understand the competitive advantages you may or may not have. Again, a little research can go a long way to supporting the argument that you're ultimately advancing when you prepare a strategic analysis. Now, there are a number of challenges for doing research for strategy. The one I hear from students more often than not is, I have too little information. I need more data here to be able to make a decision. Well, the reality is, you always have too little information, you never have exactly what you need to make that decision. And ultimately, you're making some decisions under uncertainty and complexity, and you just have to recognize that. The worst case is when you see organizations fall into what we might call paralysis by analysis. They have so much time trying to analyze their strategy, they don't actually ever execute on it. They spend too much time trying to make decisions rather than making decisions and acting. Now it's an interesting byproduct of this day and age that while we often have too little information, we also might have too much information. The Internet is awash with different facts and figures and information, and sometimes people feel overwhelmed by just the pure volume of data that can be collected on a given industry or organization. One of the biggest challenges for any strategy research project is trying to cull that information set into information that is really valuable and meaningful. Complicating it even more, often there's conflicting information out there. Different market projections, different trends analysis, surveys that are done in slightly different ways, even analyst reports that come up with radically different either recommendations or assessments of a given organization. Trying to identify what information is valid and what is invalid, what is more reliable versus less reliable is a challenge that any strategist faces when trying to go through their strategy research. We're not helped by the fact that a lot of desired information is proprietary. Think of public versus private organizations. So public organizations are required to release a lot of information that private organizations are not required. There are various things that are trade secrets held by organizations that are clearly not in the public domain. So in particular, when you're thinking about a competitor analysis, it can be quite hard sometimes to get the information you would like, because it is proprietary and tightly held. Finally, even to the extent we could go and get the information, it might actually just simply be too expensive. It could be too expensive from an actual cost standpoint, or just might be too expensive in terms of the time and effort that's required to collect it. This might even be most evident when there are many now, third parties out there who will collect data on market trends and the like, but they obviously charge for their services. How much are you willing to spend to acquire data? How valuable is that data in the end of the day? What's in essence the ROI, the return on investment, on any data collection that you engage in? So these are all major data challenges that you'll face when trying to conduct a strategy research project. So what can you do? What are some options here? Let's first talk about where some of the sources of data can be found. An obvious source that a lot of organizations have are simply their annual reports. Annual reports can be chock full of wonderful information about the intent of the organization, what they're planning to do, as well as financial information as well. In particular, for any publicly traded company, they're often required filings. In the US, there are 10K forms for example. Where they have to reveal quite a bit about their financials and their strategy moving forward. From a competitor analysis standpoint, this can be very valuable information for understanding what competitors are thinking and doing. There are other forms of disclosure as well. Patents and copyrights come to mind. Other forms of intellectual property where, to be able to get a patent, you actually have to publicly release what you're doing. This could actually be very valuable information about your competitors because it might reveal to you where they're thinking about making investments, where they might be moving technologically moving forward. Another source of good data are analysts and consultant reports. Now most of these, or many of these at least, might have a fee associated with them. Sometimes you see those that are made free and available to the public. These are groups that are paid and their business model is to collect, and synthesize and get insights into data. And those can be very useful for organizations. There's also more publicly available information, just something like news articles and press releases from individual organizations that can be very valuable. Finally, you might want to go out and actually collect data yourself through interviews and surveys, maybe about market trends, maybe what customer desires are. And these could obviously be very useful sources for data for strategic analysis as well. Finally I would recognize that we've entered into an era of what many people would call big data. Especially the rise of social media has opened up the possibilities for collecting massive amounts of data about things like consumer preferences. Think about Google, with Google Searches and Twitter and the types of tweets that people are giving out. These are actually rich sources of data that might be mined to understand where future trends are moving and alike within your industry. Beyond the data sources I've just listed, there are also some larger databases that are available that consolidate information from variety of sources. I've listed a number of publicly available sources out here, some of these you have to pay a service fee for. These are constantly changing. I think it's beyond our scope to go through these in great detail. We do talk about these in our strategist toolkit book. I would just highlight a few, Hoovers and Bloomberg provide more general information about corporations including some of their governance structure and major financials. Copustat is a comprehensive database of publicly available data on the financials of corporations. SDC Platinum provides some data on mergers and acquisitions, for example. So again, just recognize there are some databases out there that can provide collective information for you to do your strategic analysis. So, suggestions when doing research here. First, devise a research plan. How much time do you have? What is your research budget? Think about the critical path to success. Remember, if you're not careful, you might have this paralysis by analysis. You need to think through, when do you need to be making decisions? How much time do you have? And how much resources are you willing to put forward? And what is ultimately the data you need to make a good decision? And remember, this is the critical part here, how do we balance between the needed and desired data they have? What can we identify as data that is absolutely critical to make the decision versus data that is simply nice to have. Ultimately you want to be thinking about the marginal value of a particular piece of data versus another and then how you balance, then, where you spend your resources for collecting that data.
