Intelligence: the Foundation of Insight

Insight firms can be built a number of ways. Sustainable success may depend on their ability to address one critical element: intelligence.

One typical path is a media company's strategy to leverage news streams to build out more value-added analysis. Another path is a data provider or aggregator hoping to leverage data analytics to provide market insights. In both cases these information providers are hoping to garner higher prices for their standard products by dressing them up as something more. Insight firms that are not weighed down by data or media legacy infrastructure are likely to be nimbler.

Insight services need to tap into both data and news but what is far more important is building an intelligence gathering capability that goes deeper than what is publicly available. The key is building an investigative engine that can provide a steady stream of proprietary data and business intelligence that analysts can draw from to shape market, technology and competitive analysis.

The framework below, similar to Gartner's Magic Quadrant, can be useful in comparing the evolution and value propositions of insight players competing in the same industry or industries. Created by Stone Silo, we can help you map your current capabilities and where you want to go.