Lack of time and misunderstanding often push the company manager to leave aside two essential steps: the realization of a watch and a state of the art.

As a young entrepreneur, it is important that you become familiar with these two notions which will allow you to carry out your activity in the best way, and this is why we will detail them in this article.

What is the state of the art?

State of the art in business is characterized by a detailed and recent knowledge of a specific subject: it can concern a product, a process or a technology.

The objective of the state of the art is to gather recent information on the latest trends and practices in technology, products, processes… to help companies make decisions and innovate efficiently. More concretely, it allows to identify opportunities by detecting gaps in current knowledge. Companies can then use this information to improve their products, services and processes.

Let’s take a concrete example: as a leader in the field of natural remedies, Mr. M* wants to know everything about it in order to innovate and/or provide new answers to a problem. This is where the state of the art comes in: it consists of a thorough search for information, from different sources (databases, scientific journals…), on natural treatments in order to provide Mr. M with an overall view of the subject (what already exists, what does not work well…). From there, he will be able to propose a service or a product answering a problem not yet solved by his competitors.

*M.M: Anonymous abbreviation for Mr. and, in this case, a last name beginning with M.

What is business intelligence?

Business intelligence is often neglected, and this is a mistake! Indeed, it is essential to make the right choices.

Monitoring is essentially collecting and sorting useful data for the company, which will allow, for example, to

• Monitor the competition.
• Analyze market trends.
• Know the new regulations/technologies.

It is important to know that there are several types of monitoring and that they do not all have the same objectives.

We present here some types of monitoring in companies:

Financial monitoring

The main goal is to provide information on the financial health of competing companies.

Commercial intelligence (or marketing intelligence)

Performing a marketing watch allows you to optimize the commercial development of your company, in particular by targeting potential customers or suppliers.

Strategic intelligence

It is in fact a combination of several watches whose goal is to target the opportunities, but also the threats, of your project.

We can also mention the technological watch (or technical watch), the legal watch, or the environmental watch.

Monitoring and state of the art: experts can help you

Carrying out a monitoring strategy and a state of the art are complicated and time consuming tasks. Therefore, if you wish, you can call on the services of experts!

This support will allow you to :

• Make the right strategic choices.
• To find new answers to a problem.
• To discover all the novelties related to your project.
• To obtain financing by putting forward your innovative ideas.

Two assets to develop your company

To set up a watch or to carry out a state of the art are steps which take time and which seem complicated, however, we strongly recommend you to carry them out, because it is only in this way that you will obtain better prospects of development for your company.
Your company is a beautiful life project, so take care of it!