BUS602: Marketing Management

Quality assessment

Source categorization challenges scanners to assess the evidence and stimulus value of sources, e.g., as "expert," "professional," or "pundit," "amateur," and "fringe." This is NOT meant to be pejorative, only descriptive. It does, to some extent, conflate a judgment of location of emergence of insight

(scientific/rational genius vs. artistic/intuitive genius) with the timeframe of emergence (e.g., expert and fringe vs. punditry); the assumption being that something spotted in the popular press is further away from the origin point on the emergence growth curve.

A good source is one that stimulates the reader to think further and helps to classify the current evidence level:

Stimulus

Strong indicators of the stimulus levels of a source come from evaluating the potential impact of the intelligence:

• Inspiring: very high | high | neutral | low | very low 
• Engaging: very high | high | medium | low | very low
• Enabling: very high | high | medium | low | very low
• Novelty: shock | surprise | new news | old news | none

Evidence 

Strong indicators of the reliability and/or credibility of a source come from evaluating who is presenting the evidence:

• Credentials: expert | professional | pundit | amateur | fringe
• Bias: very impartial | somewhat impartial | balanced| somewhat partial | very partial
• Methodology: robust analysis | partial analysis | commentary | opinion led | speculative 
• Assumptions: accurate | deduced | faulty | inaccurate | none

The role of the scanner is to seek to improve the initial scan hit by discovering better, more robust material to raise the stimulus and evidence level. If this cannot be found then the scan hit is likely to be on the margins of change.

Depending on the readers’ interests, these types of categorizations assist in determining where they look for new opportunities, emerging risks, trigger events, disruptions, highly professional or fringe evidence, etc.