Case study: Avoiding pitfalls from what looked like a billion-dollar opportunity

Sometimes, foresight is about the risks you avoid as much as the profitable opportunities you exploit.

Competitive Futures was asked to evaluate a potential business plan for a multi-billion dollar tech company that was seeing climate change as a driver of opportunity for some of their products and services. The company was getting ready to make a significant investment in information technology solutions to monitoring requirements from upcoming climate change legislation. Before jumping in with both feet, the company wanted to assess the long-term, to make sure their assumptions were correct.

We provided the following services:

• Careful analysis of proposed legislation, including primary interviews with key government officials and thought leaders
• Detailed research on competitors to see if similar companies would be joining them in the future market space
• Analysis of global intellectual property databases to detect potential competitors
• Interviews on needs assessment with potential customers

Results:

The cacophony of media attention on global climate change made it look like billions of dollars would be changing hands over brand new services. However, the real story was that proposed legislation was utterly confusing, and customers were far from requiring the services to help them manage the proposed governmental obligations.

Competitive Futures helped our client avoid further losses in the proposed market space and instead recommended where the real action was - before their competitors could arrive on the scene.