Why We Use Open-Source and Non-Traditional Data to Gain Competitive Intelligence, Understand Markets, and Identify Investment Opportunities
An overview of how open-source intelligence, alternative data, and machine learning can help your business succeed.
In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, staying ahead of the competition requires a proactive approach to identifying opportunities and developing intelligent strategies to capitalize on them effectively. This is particularly true in the biotech and healthcare industries, where companies face a multitude of internal and external pressures such as:
Internal Pressures i.e. accelerating R&D, complex regulatory hurdles, intellectual property challenges, and securing funding.
External Pressures i.e. shifting healthcare policies, pricing pressures, and technological disruption from fields like AI and digital health.
To navigate these challenges successfully, organizations must look beyond traditional methods and embrace a forward-thinking approach that anticipates the future.
A Case for Data-Driven Decision Making
Data-driven decision making has proven to be a game-changer across various industries. Take Amazon, for example, which has become the world's leading e-commerce company by leveraging data insights from customer rankings, reviews, viewing history, and click-through rates to personalize product recommendations, optimize the purchasing process, and inform their overall sales strategy. Similarly, life sciences and healthcare companies can harness the power of data to gain valuable insights about their market, competitors, and customers, enabling them to make better company and product decisions.
At STEMA_cg, we help companies make data driven decisions, formulate their commercial strategy and enhance their product lifecycle processes. We do this by combining deep technical expertise in biological and biomedical sciences with OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence), alternative data, and machine learning (ML) to provide valuable insights and support to senior leaders and product teams in the biotechnology and healthcare industries.
What is OSINT and Alternative Data?
OSINT and alternative data emerged as powerful tools for gathering and analyzing publicly available information to generate actionable insights. Here's a brief overview of their origins and current applications:
OSINT originated in the military and intelligence communities, dating back to World War II when analysts began systematically collecting and analyzing publicly available information. It gained prominence in the digital age as the internet and social media platforms proliferated, providing vast amounts of accessible data.
Traditional Applications
Intelligence and national security: Governments and agencies use OSINT to monitor global events, assess threats, and support decision-making.
Financial services: Investment firms use alternative data to gain unique insights for trading strategies and risk assessment.
Law enforcement: OSINT aids in investigations, tracking criminal activities, and gathering evidence.
Cybersecurity: Organizations employ OSINT to identify potential threats, vulnerabilities, and attack vectors.
Journalism: Reporters use OSINT techniques for fact-checking and investigative reporting.
Alternative data, a more recent concept, emerged in the financial sector in the early 2000s. It refers to non-traditional data sources used to complement conventional financial and economic indicators.
In recent years, business intelligence has become a novel area for the use of OSINT and alternative data to preform competitive analysis, market research, and strategic planning. The rise of big data, machine learning, and advanced analytics has further enhanced the capabilities of these data types, making them indispensable tools for gathering intelligence and making informed decisions in today's information-rich environment.
Techniques to Analyze OSINT & Alternative Data
Here is a shortlist of the techniques that can make use of these data to derive insights and enhance decision making.
How We Help Biotech and Healthcare Organizations
Now that we have presented the value of OSINT, alternative data, and machine learning in business intelligence, let’s look at a few areas where these techniques can be applied to get a more comprehensive and up-to-date view of the market, competitors, and customers.
Market Research & Analysis
Consider the intense competition among companies developing next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms for genomic analysis. Internally, each company faces immense pressure to advance their technology, improve sequencing accuracy and speed, lower costs, and expand applications to gain market share in this rapidly growing field. They must allocate significant resources to R&D, manufacturing scale-up, and commercial launch readiness. Externally, NGS platform providers face pricing pressures from budget-constrained academic and clinical labs, evolving regulatory requirements for diagnostic use of NGS, and the need to integrate their platforms into existing lab workflows and data analysis pipelines.
The following case study demonstrates an example of how we can use OSINT, alternative data, and machine learning to analyze the NGS market and more specifically examining Illumina’s position against newcomers like Singular Genomics, Element Biosciences, and Ultima Genomics.
Trends
Market size and growth
Competitive Landscape
Key sectors
Opportunities
Integrating Product Life Cycle Management
Product life cycle management (PLM) is a comprehensive approach that encompasses all stages of a product's life, from inception to decline. By incorporating PLM principles and data-driven decision making, biotech and healthcare companies can:
Accelerate product development: Streamline R&D processes, identify promising candidates, and optimize clinical trial design using predictive modeling and real-time data analysis.
Enhance regulatory compliance: Monitor regulatory changes, identify potential hurdles, and proactively address compliance requirements using NLP and sentiment analysis of regulatory documents and public databases.
Improve intellectual property management: Track competitor patents, identify potential infringement risks, and uncover new IP opportunities using network analysis and anomaly detection.
Optimize product launch and commercialization: Analyze market trends, customer preferences, and competitor strategies to inform pricing, positioning, and marketing decisions using web scraping, sentiment analysis, and predictive modeling.
Sourcing, Selecting, and Supporting Investments
By leveraging OSINT, alternative data, and machine learning across the product life cycle, biotech and healthcare companies can uncover valuable investment opportunities:
Emerging technologies and platforms: Identify promising new technologies that have the potential to disrupt existing markets or create entirely new ones. Analyze market trends, competitive landscape, and key players using data aggregation, network analysis, and predictive modeling.
Undervalued assets and companies: Uncover undervalued assets, such as promising drug candidates or innovative medical devices, that may be overlooked by traditional valuation methods. Use sentiment analysis, anomaly detection, and predictive modeling to assess the true potential of these assets.
Strategic partnerships and acquisitions: Identify potential partners or acquisition targets that can strengthen a company's market position, expand its product portfolio, or provide access to new technologies and expertise. Analyze competitor strategies, market trends, and key influencers using network analysis and predictive modeling.
In summary, the combination of OSINT, alternative data, and machine learning provides a powerful toolkit for biotech and healthcare companies to navigate the complex challenges they face and identify valuable investment opportunities. By embracing these data-driven approaches and integrating them into their product life cycle management strategies, companies can gain a competitive edge and position themselves for long-term success in these rapidly evolving industries.
If you’re interested, reach out to mida@stema-cg.com to discuss how we can help your organization!