Competitive Intelligence European Summit 2009

Session Title: From a Lonesome Cowboy to a Powerful Artillery – How to Grow Your CI Department

Presenter: Christian Frey, Head of Competitive/Business Intelligence/ SIKA AG

Presenter Biography: Christian Frey works for Sika Services AG as the Head of Competitive/Business Intelligence and he is based in Zurich/Switzerland. He started his career at Sika over 20 years ago as apprentice in R&D before he went to University to earn his Masters Degree in Economics. During his studies he worked in several positions in Sika (R&D, Controlling, Marketing and Technical Services). Later he joined ExxonMobil in Switzerland where he was head of Purchasing and Accounts Payable, before he returned to Sika for his current position.

Co-Presenter Biography: Johannes Deltl has exhaustive experience in setting up new CI-structures at medium and large Corporations and in acting as a sparring-partner of existing CI units. He represents the global research company Evalueserve as a Client Executive in the German-speaking region. Evalueserve, with more than 2000 knowledge professionals, provides services from its research centers in India, China, Chile and Romania. Deltl´s new book titled “How to Beat the Competition and Win” will be released soon.

Track: CI’s Position: Roles and Responsibilities from Single Practitioner to Multi-National Corporation

Description: Getting started – basic requirements within your company you need to be successful. Map your own organization and identify the relevant stakeholders/champions for CI Setup your CI team – plan a scalable model to cover multiple languages/ multiple countries. Communicate regularly with preset tools. Measure and evaluate your partners & yourself regularly.

Take-Aways:

Learn how to market yourself as a CI practitioner
How to spread the topic CI around/within the company and add value
Understand how to utilize an external partner to increase your virtual team