Market and competitive research in support of strategy and innovation needs to go beyond traditional competitors, and their products and services, to identify and evaluate the increasing number of business ecosystems and industry platforms that are rapidly maturing.

Find out who the ecosystem and platform players are within your industry, but also which players may come in from other industries, such as high tech, to potentially disrupt your business model and traditional value chain.

In addition, it's worth thinking about how you plan to classify the various types of ecosystems and platforms in the market. For example, the recent publication from The Center for Global Enterprise, entitled "The Rise of the Platform Enterprise," classifies four types of platform as transaction, innovation, investment and integrated.