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Written by Christine Hamilton-Pennell.

Entrepreneurs may be defined as individuals who perceive an opportunity and create and grow an organisation to pursue it. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, roughly one in ten people worldwide is engaged in early-stage entrepreneurial activity, which is defined as setting up a new business or serving as owner/manager of a business up to 3.5 years old. Most of these organisations are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), yet their impact on the economy is significant. In the United States, for example, firms with fewer than 20 employees represent 97.5 percent of the total number of firms, account for half of U.S. non-farm real gross domestic product, and have generated 60 to 80 percent of the net new jobs over the past decade "The Small Business Economy", U.S. Small Business Administration, 2006:

In the early stages of their existence, these new firms focus on reaching their potential customers and becoming successful in the marketplace. As such, their need for strategic information about their markets, competitors and industries is high. While the needs of new and growing businesses vary depending upon a number of factors (regulatory environment, workforce availability, basic infrastructure and available capital, to name a few), some information needs are similar across all types of small businesses in all locations. This article addresses these common needs and identifies free and low-cost sources of business information from an international perspective.

Research Needs of Small Business Owners

All early-stage entrepreneurs must address some basic questions in order to grow their businesses. These questions represent the most common strategic research needs of SMEs.

• Who are my competitors? Who else is in my space and what are their basic offerings (product, service, price, market strategies, delivery method, etc.)? With whom could I partner?
• Who are my target customers? What are their characteristics? Do they want what I have to offer? What will they pay for it? In my customers' eyes, what differentiates me from my competitors? Where can I get lists of potential customers to let them know about my offerings?
• What are the characteristics of my market? How large is it? Is it shrinking or growing? What are the potential niches? How do I get my offerings to the market?
• What are the trends and developments in my industry?

Let's examine sources of information that can address these research needs. This round-up of resources is not exhaustive; rather it is meant to suggest a basic approach and starting point for conducting more in-depth research in each area. The focus is on information available through the Web, but keep in mind that public and university libraries have a wealth of resources that are often available for free to business owners.

Competitor Research

The first place to look for competitors is in databases containing company information that are searchable by geography and industry code or sector. InfoGROUP offers a number of business databases on a per-transaction fee basis. These include InfoUSA, (which is available through many public libraries as ReferenceUSA), InfoCanada, and InfoUK. These databases are searchable by a number of criteria, including industry sector, SIC or NAICS code, geography and size of company. Another source of company information is Hoovers which covers companies worldwide with revenues greater than $5 million USD. It is a subscription service but, on the free side, offers company profiles and limited industry information. Coverage is most comprehensive for companies in the U.S. and Canada.

Company information can also be obtained from SkyMinder, which provides company profiles and financial data for over 50 million public and private companies in more than 200 countries. Credit and financial reports are available from a variety of sources. You can search the reports for free and pay for each item individually, or you can set up a deposit account. A similar pay-as-you-go option is offered by Wolff Worldwide which has reports on more than 50 million companies in 238 countries.

Information on European companies can be found in Europages, a business-to-business directory with brief company information for 900,000 SME European and international suppliers, manufacturers and distributors (out of a total of some 25 million in Europe). The directory can be searched by company name, product or process and industry sector, and results can be filtered by country.

Another interesting source for finding competitor companies is the Tradekey website, essentially a marketplace linking buyers and sellers of specific products in more than 200 countries. It's a handy way of finding out who else is in your product space.

Once competitors have been identified, you can glean more information by carefully examining the company's website. It is worth looking at the website for the parent company as well. Additional information about specific companies and industries can be garnered from news sources, press releases, and trade publications. Some of this content is freely available on the Web, but much of it resides in subscription databases such as Factiva, Lexis-Nexis and Dialog.

Several free and low-cost business news sources offer company information. FPInfomart.ca provides detailed company, industry, financial and securities data on 4,000 Canadian public companies, and directory information on more than 450,000 Canadian companies. News articles and reports are available for a nominal fee. For the U.S., Bizjournals offers free full-text access to news articles from business newspapers in more than 40 regions in the U.S. You can search for articles by company, industry or name.

Links to other news sources around the world are available through portals such as Yale University's Latin American News Sources and Rutgers Library News Sources page, which links to business-related electronic news sources, industry news and trade magazines, and open source scholarly business E-journals.

Customer and Market Research

Market research reports such as those produced by Euromonitor or Frost & Sullivan provide in-depth information about markets and consumers for specific industries and product categories. These reports can be very expensive, but you can find a lot of useful information in abstracts and tables of contents, which you can search for free through market research aggregators such as MarketResearch.com and Researchandmarkets. For example, the abstract for a recent report on the cosmetics and fragrance industry in the UK reveals market penetration numbers, industry trends and key market segments. The full report costs more than €1,000.

Sources of customer and market information in Europe include the EU's Directorate-General for Health and Consumer Protection's free downloadable report, "Consumers in Europe - Facts and Figures" which offers data from various sources including Eurostat. Europa offers statistical tools, lists of associations and organisations providing support and assistance for businesses, and business directories. For the U.S., community demographic and lifestyle information is available by postal code from ESRI.

Free market research reports and competitor information from public and private sources are available through Free Research. This source covers 27 vertical markets, from Automotive to Travel, in most countries around the world. Most reports are brief - from one paragraph to several pages. Other useful content includes trade associations in each of the global industry sectors, as well as country guides and market insight reports.

UN Comtrade provides access to the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database of more than one billion trade data records from 1962 onward. You can search for statistics on imports or exports of selected commodities during a specified period of time from one country to another.

Industry Trend Research

For the U.S., a wealth of industry information is available through the Economic Census. Another good source of industry information for the U.S. is Industry Information Resources, a free resource guide to industry resources and data for more than 400 industries in the U.S. Industry Canada provides information on service-and-goods-producing Canadian industries.

A good place to start your search for industry information in different countries is Nationmaster.com which features facts and figures on countries and regions from a variety of international resources. Industry data includes statistics on per capita production and consumption of products, industrial growth rates and patent applications. Other sections provide population demographics and lifestyle information, economic information, and export and import statistics. Economist.com contains a country briefings section with news, country profiles, economic forecasts and statistics on more than 80 countries.

Several international bodies provide economic and statistical information for countries around the world. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) offers a number of data and statistics reports for 181 countries. In IMF's World Economic Outlook Databases, you can find national accounts, inflation, unemployment rates, balance of payments, fiscal indicators, trade for countries and country groups (aggregates) and commodity prices. Likewise, the World Bank in its section on data and research, provides access to trade briefs on selected developing economies, commodity forecasts, and data about global economic prospects.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) issues demographic and economic reports on an ongoing basis for its 30 OECD member countries, as well as occasional reports for several non-member countries. These resources cover gross domestic product, international trade statistics, price statistics, economic projections, labour force statistics and many more topics. The site also offers a free online version of the "OECD Factbook: Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics".

Sometimes, the small business owner needs to talk to an expert to get the kind of specialised knowledge that is not available in published sources. The Web offers directories of experts such as Expert Guide, a free Australian source that links journalists with Australian academics, and PROFNET from PRNewswire which has a searchable database of more than 25,000 experts. You can also locate experts through business-related social networks such as LinkedIn whose members hail mostly from the U.S. and Canada, and Xing which has a European focus.

For early-stage entrepreneurs, there is a rich variety of company, market and industry information on the Web for free, or for a nominal fee, to provide the strategic help they need to grow their enterprises.

This article is included in the FUMSI Report: Folio on Competitive Intelligence. Learn more and purchase.

Christine Hamilton-Pennell, M.L.I.S, M.A.R., is Founder and President of Growing Local Economies (www.growinglocaleconomies.com), a company that provides training, consulting and research to communities developing local entrepreneurship support initiatives. Previously, she served as the economic intelligence analyst for the City of Littleton, Colorado, where she provided strategic consulting, competitive intelligence, marketing support and customized research to small businesses as part of their Economic Gardening project. You can reach her at christine@growinglocaleconomies.com.

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