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This chapter’s aim is to outline and highlight the components of strategic planning and management framework, as well as the value and utility of strategic analysis and competitor analysis.

Extensive literature review was conducted on conceptual issues and management aspects of human resources management. A practical approach has been adopted and implemented to illustrate the value of strategic analytical tools.

This chapter provides a description and an understanding of how the analyses and tools of strategic planning and management could be used to plan and implement a business venture better. It discusses the tools enhancing the analysis of the business environment in the field of tourism.

This study is explorative in nature because the discussion is mostly based on a literature review. It takes more entrepreneurial/practical than academic approach.

The analyses of the business environment and of the competition in an industry are tasks of critical importance. If these analyses are adequately performed, the probability of success may increase. This chapter discusses the purpose, the process and the implementation of tools of strategic analysis and competitor analysis. Practical recommendations and steps are also provided.

The analytical frameworks, tools and techniques discussed in this chapter should enhance prospective entrepreneurs to adequately perform their task of analysing the tourism business environment.

This study discusses the problems of organising competitive intelligence activities in a corporate organisation. Traditionally in many large corporations the collection, interpretation and analysis of competitive information has been assigned to a specialised intelligence or competitor analysis unit in order to exploit the synergy created by centralisation. This organising mechanism has, however, serious shortcomings that are considered in this study. It is debated that this centralised and systematic approach to managing and exploiting competitive information ignores the actual ways that managers and other knowledge workers utilise information resources in their work processes. An empirical study was made in a multinationally operating Finnish forest industry company in order to examine, what kind of competitive information managers and other knowledge workers need in their work processes, what were the most valuable information sources and how this information was actually utilised and communicated inside the corporation. The results of this empirical study are discussed. Some guidelines are provided to improve the process of coordinating and combining both systematically and unsystematically collected competitive information into a coherent organisational mechanism.

Competitor analysis is a key component in operations management. Most business decisions are rooted in the analysis of rival products inferred from market structure. Relative to more traditional competitor analysis methods, the purpose of this paper is to provide operations managers with an innovative tool to monitor a firm’s market position and competitors in real time at higher resolution and lower cost than more traditional competitor analysis methods.

The authors combine the techniques of Web Crawler, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning algorithms with data visualization to develop a big data competitor-analysis system that informs operations managers about competitors and meaningful relationships among them. The authors illustrate the approach using the fitness mobile app business.

The study shows that the system supports operational decision making both descriptively and prescriptively. In particular, the innovative probabilistic topic modeling algorithm combined with conventional multidimensional scaling, product feature comparison and market structure analyses reveal an app’s position in relation to its peers. The authors also develop a user segment overlapping index based on user’s social media data. The authors combine this new index with the product functionality similarity index to map indirect and direct competitors with and without user lock-in.

The approach improves on previous approaches by fully automating information extraction from multiple online sources. The authors believe this is the first system of its kind. With limited human intervention, the methodology can easily be adapted to different settings, giving quicker, more reliable real-time results. The approach is also cost effective for market analysis projects covering different data sources.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.

Competition among charities for donor income has increased dramatically in recent years. Moreover, charities have to compete against each other for cause related marketing contracts with commercial enterprises and sponsorship deals, and must bid competitively for government grants. This empirical study explored attitudes and behaviour in relation to competitor analysis (CA) within a sample of 134 British charities. It examined, inter alia, the main sources and uses of CA information, internal stakeholders’ views on whether non‐profit organisations should compete, CA management methods, satisfaction with CA, and possible linkages between CA and fundraising performance. An important aim of the investigation was to establish whether the presence of certain factors known to affect the extent of competition (and by implication the intensity of CA) in purely commercial markets similarly influenced organisations in the charity sector. Conversely, internal stakeholder resistance to the idea that charities should compete against each other did not appear to modify the sample organisations’ actual CA behaviours in any way.

The textbooks are full of explanations of why businesses must understand their competitive arena. There are numerous conceptual frameworks and checklists to assist in this endeavour. Perhaps not too surprisingly, many businesses exhibit only a superficial knowledge of their competitors’ strategies and actions, taking little account of their rivals when formulating their own marketing plans. The electronics industry, already the fourth most important industrial sector in the world, is tipped to become the principal growth sector in the next century. A recent survey reveals that in this important industry, companies’ attempts to understand their competitors do not always live up to the models of Michael Porter or Philip Kotler.

It's not prudent to venture into international markets without learning how to gather local competitive intelligence. But you can start your analysis project without leaving your desk.

Considers the nature and scope of a competitor in‐formation system (CIS) and the contribution to strategic planning decisions. Investigates the process of operationalizing a CIS as an “intelligence cycle” with discrete organizational activities of identifying needs, collecting, processing, disseminating and using intelligence. Gives a detailed case study of setting up a CIS in a life assurance company, the practical problems met and the solutions adopted. These include the identification of key strategic issues, strategic groupings of competitors, user analysis, and the final collection, evaluation and processing of the data using a hyper‐media software called Guidex. Draws conclusions to guide other system users and designers.