Managing the market learning process

Organizations continuously learn about their markets through the linked processes of market sensing and sense making. Firms that have mastered these two processes gain an advantage by anticipating market opportunities ahead of their rivals and more accurately forecasting how the market will respond to their moves. Our purposes are first, to describe the primary mechanisms for acquiring market information and turning it into market knowledge; second, to assess the pitfalls and power of the mental models used by organizations to filter, sort and simplify market information into coherent patterns; and then to prescribe some ways to improve a market learning capability.