For manufacturing R&D teams, gaining insights into competitors’ product roadmaps and innovations is key to determining where to invest resources for maximum success. By analyzing competitors’ pipelines, performance data, customer reviews, and emerging technologies, manufacturers can pinpoint unmet needs, spot opportunities for differentiation, and avoid duplicating competitors’ efforts. The result is higher product success rates and accelerated innovation.
Competitive intelligence provides R&D leaders with insights into:
- Competitors’ product pipelines: Knowing competitors’ future and in-development products helps determine where R&D efforts should focus to meet customers’ unfulfilled needs first. It also highlights opportunities to improve upon competitors’ planned or newly released products. Monitoring patents and acquisitions also clues manufacturers into technologies competitors are investing in.
- Performance issues or unmet customer needs: Analyzing online reviews, customer service reports, and other feedback on competitors’ products reveals pain points, unmet needs, and opportunities for improvement that manufacturers can address in their own products. Focusing R&D on these gaps in customer satisfaction boosts success rates.
- Emerging technologies: Tracking trends in materials, components, data capabilities, and tools that competitors are leveraging provides signals as to where R&D investments may yield innovations that sell. But it also allows manufacturers to leverage the same enabling technologies to fast-track development. Either way, insights into the tech landscape help optimize R&D.
- Opportunities to differentiate: The areas where competitors are not innovating or investing present openings for manufacturers to differentiate with product features, capabilities or attributes that stand out. Mapping out competitors’ product roadmaps alongside target customer needs makes these differentiation opportunities clear.
Examples of manufacturers gaining an R&D advantage through competitive insights include:
- Husqvarna, which monitors online reviews and forums to determine dissatisfaction with competitors’ chainsaws and lawn mowers. They then invest R&D resources into designing equipment that specifically addresses key pain points, achieving very high customer satisfaction and ratings as a result.
- 3M, which closely tracks emerging technologies in materials and adhesives to determine how to leverage and build upon them to create unique, high-performing products. By staying on the cutting edge, 3M is able to commercialize new products faster than competitors.
- John Deere, which employs a large competitive intelligence team to analyze farming equipment reviews, crop yield data, and customer feedback to pinpoint opportunities for design improvements and new features that address actual customer needs. As a result, John Deere’s new farm machinery regularly outpaces competitors’ models in sales and performance.
Conclusion
Competitive intelligence significantly improves manufacturers’ R&D productivity and innovation success. By determining where competitors are investing or not investing, manufacturers can deploy their resources efficiently in the areas of greatest opportunity. With CI guiding R&D strategy, product pipelines will yield superior solutions that win more customer acquisition and revenue while moving manufacturing brands into sustainable leadership positions. Gaining a competitive edge and higher product success rates is a matter of outthinking your rivals to give customers exactly what they need.
