Industry analysis

Industry analysis is a method for investment research that begins by focusing on the state of an industry or market sector.

Uses of the method

Analysis of an industry structure and strategy
Determine corporate strategy
Testing corporate strategy against industry strategy

Benefits

Essential method for investment decisions
Shines a light on industry strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
Points to potential white spaces for future exploitation

Disadvantages

May still be incomplete without use of other methods here
Can be time consuming and costly to do

Steps to complete

Complete the template
Describe your most exciting and most feared idea here
Determine the fixed elements (almost certain hard trends) that will inform your strategic response: slow-changing phenomena e.g. demographic shifts, constrained situations e.g. resource limits, in the pipeline e.g. aging of baby boomers, inevitable collisions e.g. climate change arguments
Capture critical variables i.e. uncertainties, soft trends and potential surprises. Both these and the fixed elements will be key to creating scenarios and examining potential future paradigm shifts
Capture unique insight into new ways of seeing that can be utilized by the organization
- What conclusions can we draw from the exercise(s)?
- How might the future be different?
- How does A affect B?
- What is likely to remain the same or change significantly?
- What are the likely outcomes?
- What and who will likely shape our future?
- Where could we be most affected by change?
- What might we do about it?
- What don't we know that we need to know?
- What should we do now, today?
- Why do we care?
- When should we aim to meet on this?
Finish by noting your next steps. Next steps could include a further round of iteration, a recommendation on how to get the answers or use of other research and methods such as 'Starburst' to create more vantage points on the issue.

Collaboration
This method and your response can be shared with other members or kept private using the 'Privacy' field and through the 'Tag', 'Report' and 'Forum' functionalities. Use 'Tag' and/or 'Report' to aggregate your analyzes, or add a 'Forum' to ask others where they agree/disagree and encourage them to make their own analysis from their unique vantage point.

Click the 'Invite tab to send invitations to other members or non-members (colleagues, external experts etc.) to ask for their input. You can whether or not you want anonymous responses. These can be viewed and exported within the Responses tab.

Further reference

Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, Professor Michael Porter - (New York: The Free Press, 1980)
Industry Handbook: Porter's 5 Forces Analysis, Investopedia
How to conduct an Industry analysis, sbtdc

History
Stakeholder analysis of the form used here was originally proposed by Professor Michael Porter at Harvard University and others in the form of competitive analysis from 1980. Since then the subject of analyzing competitors and other stakeholders has grown dramatically. We present a number of tried and tested methods here to look at stakeholders from various perspectives.

Contact us
Even with all the advice and tools we have provided here starting a foresight project from scratch can be a daunting prospect to a beginner. Let us know if you need help with this method or want a group facilitation exercise or full project or program carrying out by us. We promise to leave behind more internal knowledgeable people who can expand your initiative for better organizational performance.

Are there other enhancements or new methods you would like to see here? Let us know and we will do our best to respond with a solution quickly.

Copyright
Some rights reserved. This particular part of the website is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Industry analysis

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