Sunday
May082011
SCIP Vienna 2011
Call for proposals
SCIP asks for proposals to speek at the 2011 Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Summit, 8-10 November in Vienna, Austria.
As your Chairman for the 2011 Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Summit, 8-10 November in Vienna, Austria I would like to invite you to contribute to the Summit with your session or workshop. Below you can find the entire text of the Call for Proposals and the direct download links for the forms.
2011 SCIP European Summit Conference Call for Proposals
The Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) will present the European Summit November 8-10, 2011 in Vienna Austria.
SCIP continues to develop and provide educational programming and networking opportunities for its members all over the world. The European Summit traditionally has one of the most diverse attendance and speaker constituencies of all of our conferences. The 2011 European Summit call for proposals will open on May 6, 2011 and will close on June 7, 2011. Once the proposals are reviewed and sessions selected, notifications of acceptance will be sent to presenters via e-mail. SCIP reserves the right to invite additional presenters to the program.
All proposals must feature case studies and/or demonstrated best practices -- year after year attendees have told us they want to hear about successes and lessons learned in competitive intelligence practice. Proposals that provide case examples and professional tips for the audience will be given preference in the selection process.
Below are areas of focus suggested by our content committee but proposals on additional topics are also welcome.
1. Gaining Influence for the Competitive Intelligence Unit
Gaining influence is a critical part of any successful competitive intelligence program, because doing the right job and doing the job right sometimes is not enough. One needs also to demonstrate the importance and relevance of their work. It is not only a matter of merit, it is also a matter of how CI is presented and perceived.
Examples of topics for sessions and questions to be addressed are:
o Demonstrating through real-life cases how a competitive intelligence unit managed to gain influence and importance within a given company
Which tools were successfully used to increase the importance of CI within your organization, and how were they used?
How do you make competitive intelligence a critical component of your company?
How do you engage senior management in the competitive intelligence effort?
How do you secure the resources to complete the task (financial, personnel and others)?
o Overcoming barriers within the decision making process to increase visibility and influence of competitive intelligence
Once the job is completed successfully, how do you increase the resources dedicated to the CI unit? Is that expansion actually necessary or desirable?
How do you effectively influence people within and outside of your own organization?
How do you make competitive intelligence an integral part of the decision-making process?
o Supporting tactical and operational decisions
How should competitive intelligence support the sales organization?
How should a competitive intelligence unit be structured to support different decision making entities?
2. Competitive Intelligence Communication
Communication is a key element in effectively accomplishing the Intelligence Cycle, especially the communicating competitive intelligence products and enhancing the relationship between the unit and the decision maker. Speakers will provide an actual experience and ways that practitioners solved their problems and enhanced their CI unit’s performance. Examples of topics and questions to be addressed are: Starting and completing the intelligence cycle: identifying the right needs and delivering the right products.
o How do you keep the competitive intelligence unit’s focus aligned with the decision-maker’s real needs?
o How do you conduct regular assessments of management’s Key Intelligence Topics?
o How do you obtain regular feedback from your decision-maker clients? Creating a good relationship and lines of communication with your decision-maker.
o How do you encourage your decision-makers to use the CI unit and request challenging jobs.
o How do you get your decision-maker to understand what information you need to do your job?
3. Innovation and the Competitive Intelligence Process
How much of innovation has to do with insights, and how much has to do with hard work? An actual competitive intelligence process based on knowledge, alongside its systematic pursuit of information and its analysis can have a great impact on the innovation processes.
Unexpected occurrences, different kinds of contradictions, process needs, or changes in an industry or market can create opportunities for the company. Competitive intelligence can help innovators to look for focused and simple solutions to approach real life problems and thus create successful opportunities. Examples of topics for speeches and questions to be addressed are: The CI role: Open innovation versus traditional innovation
o How can CI participate and boost the innovation process within companies?
o What kind of CI outputs might be useful in the innovation process?
o How do you use networks to foster innovation within your company?
o Is it possible to create fruitful synergies between CI and the innovation process? Using CI to find unexplored markets. Using CI as an innovation tool in emerging markets.
o CI as a tool in technology and organizational innovation. Applying technology innovation to boost the CI process.
4. Analysis Tools
Intelligence is only produced through an analytical process that takes the information and evidences collected and works through them to extract meaning and significance for the decision making process. Analysis is a creative process that is done inside our minds. We can accomplish it with the help of frameworks and methodologies, or in an unstructured way in which we use our intuition and previous knowledge to create connections among data and drive conclusions. In this topic experienced practitioners are expected to share their knowledge on how they have successfully been using analysis to deliver Intelligence to their decision makers.
Examples of topics to be addressed are:
Presenting your own experience on using traditional methodologies and their influence on the decision making process. This can be either on the tactical or strategic level. Case and results are expected.
o How do you use short analysis to add value to the collected data?
o How do you get organizational and shared knowledge to come to sound conclusions even without using any structured methodology? Explaining a new or a non-traditional methodology.
o How it is done?
o In which situations should it be applied
o What are the steps and framework, and how do you arrive at a conclusion.
Showing a successful case of developing collective analysis to solve a business problem.
5. Competitive Intelligence and Strategy
Intelligence is the radar of any company’s strategy. Managing a company’s strategy without a competitive intelligence process is like navigating through a fog without instruments. To develop and implement a successful strategy, companies must have a CI process that allows them to leverage from information and perspectives, thus becoming able to anticipate environmental changes, threats or opportunities, and establish goals and implement better strategies to approach it’s environment. Likewise SCIP’s name change reasons, CI and Strategy belong to the same discussion and must not be treated separately.
Examples of topics to be addressed are: Connecting Strategy and CI: why both must be tightly related.
o How do you fit CI in the strategy building process (conceptual discussion)?
o What are the strategic aspects of CI, over the tactical aspects?
o How do you introduce CI in the strategic decision process?
o How can CI service influence a company’s strategy?
o What are examples of successful participation of CI service in strategy elaboration process? Provide examples of successful CI service collaboration in scenario analysis process or War Games Providing examples of why CI and strategic management must be a symbiotic process.
o How do you use CI in support of M&A, long range planning and internationalization.
o What are some cases and discussions of M&A or internationalization process supported by CI process?
6. Structuring and Modifying a CI Unit
Many doctors would agree that performing an open heart surgery is simple: one can learn the basics in 6 months. However, doing it right and learning what to do if anything goes wrong, or if there is any deviation from the original plan, can take many years. The same can be said about building up and managing a competitive intelligence unit. Examples of topics for speeches and questions to be addressed are: What does a properly formed CI unit look like; How to fix CI units that were not formed properly from the beginning; How to increase the effectiveness of your CI unit; How to develop the critical competences required from a CI unit and its professionals.
SPEAKER BENEFITS
The session presentations are 45 – 60 minutes in length and will be scheduled on the 9th or the 10th of November, 2011. The European Summit presentations can be in PowerPoint for those speakers who are in the practitioner category and should be in an interactive category without the use of PowerPoint for those in the solution provider category. Selected speakers will receive one complimentary registration to the main conference (November 9-10, 2011. This does not include registration for pre-conference workshops. Travel expenses and other related costs will not be compensated.
Co Presenters: If a co-presenter is requested for the presentation, please define what that person would add to the program so that we can determine if this co-presenter would possibly qualify for a complimentary registration. Co-presenters will not be accepted after your proposal is submitted unless requested by the Program Team. Signed agreements are required for both Primary and Co-Presenters. Duplication: If two proposals contain similar content, selection will be based on both quantitative and qualitative merit.
Call for proposals document download
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