Most organizations aspire to be known as an industry leader. After all, being known as the leading authority on your marketplace implies a certain level of quality and builds trust with your audience and peers. Many organizations will say that they lead and don’t follow but how do they know if this is true?

The value of competitive intelligence is often overlooked for many businesses however; CI should have a significant focus in business strategy to drive decision-making. That said, while there may be a shortage of companies using CI in their business strategy, companies gather competitive intelligence at higher rates than ever.

In the anthology of business stories, there is no shortage of Davids who rose above the Goliaths victorious. We are all too familiar with the Davids-turned-Goliaths like Apple, Google and Amazon. We study them at length while millions of startups look to emulate them on their path to success. We don't however; spend a much time trying to understand the fall of the once-upon-a-time-Goliaths. Buzzkill? Maybe. But their stories are packed with valuable intel, lessons and mistakes that can teach all of us how to run better organizations.

The aging population and the inability to attract enough new Canadians is posing serious problems to businesses.  All levels of government are ramping up the focus and efforts to address this problem, and increasingly a variety of economic development stakeholders are joining in the effort.  International students are becoming an interesting and crucial option - they bring tremendous social, economic and cultural benefits to Canada and attracting and retaining greater numbers of immigrants, and leveraging that potential maybe the answer to addressing our growing talent gap.