Know Your Competition!
Part of a strong business plan is making the case for why your product/service stands out from its peers. You're expected to know your competition inside and out.
While some competitors are immediately obvious through rankings and general research, smaller firms don't always make the usual hits.
- Mintel Global New Products DatabaseMonitors worldwide product innovation and new product activity in consumer packaged goods markets. Covers food, drink, household, beauty & personal care, healthcare, and pet sectors across key global markets.
Industry Research Resources
Do you know the trends affecting your industry? Are there government regulations that affect your ability to enter a particular industry? What are the top industry associations?
Use these resources to answer industry questions.
- IBISWorldIBISWorld provides industry research reports and profiles for over 700 United States industries as well as a wide range of industries in China. Business reports for five categories: industry market research, industry risk ratings, company research, global industry research, and economic and demographic data. Each report provides key statistics, market characteristics and segmentation, industry conditions, leading competitors, industry performance analysis and future outlook.
- Business Source CompleteBusiness Source Complete provides full text for scholarly business journals and other sources, including full text for more than 1,800 peer-reviewed business publications. Coverage includes virtually all subject areas related to business. This database provides full text (PDF) for top scholarly journals, including the Harvard Business Review. It also includes industry and country reports from Euromonitor and company and industry reports from Datamonitor.
- PassportExcellent resource for international industries, countries, markets, and products. Market research reports, statistics, and analyst reports cover consumer market sizes, country market data, forecasts, consumer lifestyles, companies and brands, and many product & location specific reports.
- Associations UnlimitedAssociations often provide free reports and industry data. Covers approximately 460,000 international and US national, regional, state, and local nonprofit membership organizations in all fields, including IRS data on U.S. 501(c) nonprofit organizations.
- Business and Company Resource CenterExcellent information for a wide range of industries, both US-based and global. Includes the "Encyclopedia of American Industries" and "Encyclopedia of Emerging Industries."
- Market InsightContains Standard and Poor's industry surveys, a premier source of US industry information. They include current outlook and trend information; How to analyze a company in the industry and provide industry references.
- Technomic IgniteTechnomic Ignite is the premier database for researching chain restaurants. Find sales figures, menus, franchise information, rankings, news, industry publications, and more.
- U.S. Small Business Administration: Small Business Resources GuideSmall business resources guide from US SBA.
- US Economic CensusSurvey of all US businesses conducted every 5 years. (2002, 2007, etc.). Choose "reports by sector" or use the "statistics sampler" search engine.
- US Government online resourcesNAICS - industry code descriptions
American Factfinder - city, demographic, income data
Statistical Abstract - compendium of government, association and business statistics
Industry News
Keep track of what is being written about your indusry, competitors, trends and opportunities. Media coverage can be a great source of most recent information for even the smallest or niche industries.
- Business Source CompleteBusiness Source Complete provides full text for scholarly business journals and other sources, including full text for more than 1,800 peer-reviewed business publications. Coverage includes virtually all subject areas related to business. This database provides full text (PDF) for top scholarly journals, including the Harvard Business Review. It also includes industry and country reports from Euromonitor and company and industry reports from Datamonitor.
- FactivaFull-text online service for international news and business information. Covers over 28,000 sources in 23 languages in more than 150 countries. Some company and market research is included. Factiva includes full-text coverage of the Wall Street Journal.
- Lexis-Nexis Academic UniverseContains thousands of newspapers, newswires, legal cases, patents, and trade journals.