Competitive Intelligence Searching
Using DialogWeb
Introduction
Dialog is the world's largest databank of information, providing access to more than 500 different information collections known as databases. Dialog has an extensive collection of databases that provide business and financial data.
For example, on Dialog you can find:
- Basic company information, such as address, telephone number, and company officials, and key financial data like 10-K reports.
- Company and industry news, including introduction of new products, sales, increases in research and development spending.
- Analyst reports on companies, an industry, or a specific country.
- Detailed market research on specific industries or companies.
- Product information, such as new product launches.
- Information on mergers, acquisitions, alliances, and partnerships.
Course Description
This course offers the Dialog searcher the opportunity to become familiar with the techniques and databases necessary to locate competitive intelligence information using DialogWeb, Dialog's Web-based interface. The goal of the online course is to illustrate how Dialog can help provide you with a competitive intelligence system in order to uncover information about your competitors' strengths and weaknesses.
Each of the six lessons in the course illustrates one of the applications above and is designed as a standalone unit. Each focuses on the techniques and databases for a specific business application, and includes a What's Next section which identifies other resources available from Dialog to help with your competitive intelligence needs.
For example, to find out about the latest alliances for a specific company, you can go directly to Lesson 6, "Mergers, Acquisitions, Alliances, and Partnerships" to learn techniques to use and databases to access to obtain the information you need.
Of course, to see how Dialog can help provide you with a complete competitive intelligence system, proceed through the entire course, starting with Lesson 1 and progressing lesson by lesson to the end. This will provide you with a comprehensive picture of various applications that will enable you to uncover information about your competitors and industry.
Plan to spend about 30–45 minutes to complete each lesson or approximately 4–5 hours for the total course.
