For competitive intelligence research, curated content and curated sources matter

We often tell our enterprise clients and prospects competitive intelligence (CI) research is about the “outside world” – what’s happening in the markets your organization serves and, specifically, at the companies you compete against currently, or may compete against in the future – which is why an organization’s CI content should start with business news from reliable media sources.

But how do you know which online media outlets to monitor? After all, on the internet, all content is not created equal – some is factual and authoritative, some is of dubious veracity if not wholly fabricated (“fake news”) – and the sheer volume of content has expanded exponentially, so content selectivity is more vital than ever.

That’s why Northern Light methodically curates the online media sources we aggregate in our Northern Light Business News collection, available to all SinglePoint™ knowledge management platform clients.  From a news perspective, we’ve boiled down the internet to 4,000 media sources – all business-focused, many on a particular industry, that conduct original reporting with high journalistic standards — which publish some 30,000 original stories per day. We aggregate them, then consistently tag and index them in Northern Light Business News.  This collection of curated news sources represents a great starting point for virtually any competitive intelligence research query.

For other content collections, Northern Light curates individual documents.  For example, the Northern Light Corporate Financial Reports collection contains more than 700,000 documents, including quarterly investor presentations and annual reports for some 4,000 public companies, in addition to filings accessible in the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission’s EDGAR database. While there are many ways to get SEC filings, having the quarterly investor presentations and annual reports in one easy to use location is a real advantage for our clients.  And making them accessible through SinglePoint knowledge management portals, deeply tagged and with rich text analytics, multiplies their value many times over.

Another example of Northern Light content curation is our Life Sciences Conference Abstracts collection. This is a gray literature database that provides unique access to over 3.5 million abstracts and posters from 4,300 medical and life sciences conferences across the globe dating back to 2010, uniquely compiled by Northern Light.  Because peer reviewed journal articles reporting on research often appear years after the research was completed, the only way to stay truly up to date is to access the research being presented at conferences — and only Northern Light delivers that content in a readily searchable way.  The collection is ideal for research scientists at pharmaceutical and biotech companies, healthcare organizations, academic institutions, research libraries, and research teams at hospitals.

In business, marketers, strategic planners, product developers and others must have high confidence in the sources they rely upon for the competitive intelligence and market research that informs their critical business decisions.  Ensuring the integrity of content is key, which is why Northern Light focuses so intently on both content curation and, in the case of business news, source curation.

Because without the right content, a knowledge management platform – even a great one like Northern Light SinglePoint! – won’t take you very far.  On the other hand, a KM platform optimized for market research and market and competitive intelligence (SinglePoint), functionally enriched with generative AI and other machine learning capabilities, drawing upon all of an organization’s vetted internal and licensed external research content, is a powerful tool to help enable better business decisions.