As one of the board members of the dcif (Deutsches Competitive Intelligence Forum) and one of the contributors of this event I am far away from being neutral on that subject but I would like to leave a few comments on the 4th German CI conference which was held in Bad Nauheim on 25th and 26th of October (last week). For the first time we combined our German annual conference with the annual European SCIP event - and according to the number of participants and also to many comments I heard during the event it was a huge success.
First of all - like I said in my presentation on the development of dcif on Thursday - we all owe Rainer Michaeli, dcif president and manager of the conference, respect and thanks for pushing all of us forward and for his contribution that made everything possible in the first place. He’s definitely the guy who was willing to lose his head and mind in order to provide the best possible event.
Again we had a wide range of content on CI - presented by 35 speakers and a great presentation of state-of-the-art tools and services by the vendors in the exhibition. Roughly 280 attendees from over 20 European countries and from China, India, Israel, North America and South Africa participated in discussions and networking opportunities.
I met many people I know from former SCIP conferences and made some new friends. Apart from the insights you gain by speaking with CI professionals from all over the world those new and renewed connections are extremely valuable when your back home planning and doing international projects for clients. I hope that we are also able to transfer the enthusiasm of the conference into the continuous work of the dcif. And - I have to admit that - I was very pleased that some of the speakers referred to my book…
Especially interesting for me were the sessions which touched the influence of Web 2.0 tools and techniques on competitive intelligence research and analyses since I realize projects in this field with my other company Voiceletter. In one of the next postings I will write a little bit on the experiences Ford and the University of Applied Science in Cologne have presented during the conference. My overall impression is that podcasts and blogs are recognized as new communication channels but still are far from being used systematically in early warning procedures.
