Enhancing Competitive Intelligence Using Geospatial Analysis and Social-Media Corpora
Competitors analysis, which is an essential element of corporate strategy, is a technique used to assess competitor (current and future) threats. Firms cannot ignore their competitors. The challenges of keeping their competitive advantage and increasing growth can be a difficult task for businesses when they do not observe competitors’ activities. Researchers have extensively investigated competitors analysis, or competitive intelligence (CI); however, a gap exists in the literature in integrating the nonspatial attributes of a social-media corpus with the spatial attributes like tweet location, where both may enhance a firm’s CI assessment. For that reason, the purpose of this study was to investigate how the socialmedia corpus, and geospatial analysis, may enhance a firm’s CI, which may lead to enhanced business insight. This dissertation presents three research papers on the use of CI. Each research paper focuses on and is organized to achieve a specific goal. The first research paper provides a literature review on the major studies on geospatial analysis and the social-media corpus along with CI. The second research paper is exploratory research that details the construction of an artifact to calculate the CI landscape of the telecommunication industry using geospatial analysis and the social-media corpus. The third research paper uses the design-science-research (DSR) approach to design and build the proposed artifact. From DSR lens, the artifact is evaluated using a mixed-method to examine the constructed artifact. Findings indicated participants had positive reactions to system usability, user experience, CI improvement, and usefulness measurements. Thus, the findings disseminate knowledge to the DSR and behavioral-science-research audiences.
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