The Discovery Advantage
No, I’m not talking about a credit.
I mean the advantage of discovering something before the knowledge has widely been disseminated. Talking lately about queues, I encountered today a rare zero-queue situation.
I needed a few replacement government cards and found a ServiceOntario office close to my house that had opened two weeks earlier. I came equipped with my laptop for some serious waiting but was actually ushered to a wicket as soon as I entered. I was out in seven minutes.
Stumbling upon an information advantage isn’t a viable strategy for developing sustainable value creation. Discovery in advance of widespread dissemination needs to be systematized.
A few tools that anyone can use to start to create a slight advantage are:
- Wayback Machine — https://archive.org/web/ — An archive of changes to most websites.
- Google Alerts — any articles or posts about the subject of your choosing.
- Website change monitoring tools. There are a number of these on the market but they can alert you of any changes within hours.
