If you have a competitive intelligence program at all, you, or organizations you have hired, are probably doing one or more of the following:

• Searching the web and online databases
• Conducting surveys and interviews of a competitor's customer base
• Observing the competitor's new construction-in-progress, customer service performance, and other outward facing activity
• Competitive benchmarking
• Reverse engineering

These are all useful activities and should yield valuable information on which to act upon. But instead of competitive intelligence only being a highly centralized activity, you should potentially involve your entire company. Your product development, marketing, sales, strategy, and customer support groups are all mindful of your competition as they are doing their jobs. In fact, practically everyone in your company is driven in some way by the competitive landscape in your industry.

For example, your people spend time looking at the competition when they think of what features should be in upcoming products and services, they analyze competitive marketing messages when crafting your own marketing campaigns, and are regularly launching strategic initiatives in reaction to the industry landscape. Your employees may even buy products your competitors make. In other words, there's a lot of untapped knowledge about your competition. Why not take advantage of this untapped resource by asking your people to predict what your competition will do?