Center for Semantic Excellence

In business marketplaces, competition among vendors with similar offerings has been seen as the force that drives quality and service up while driving prices for consumers down. However, as demand and supply situations grow in size, complexity, subtlety, and importance — for example, in healthcare — players other than vendors become invested in different outcomes in that supply chain ... and tend to pull proposed solutions in multiple directions. An already difficult competitive environment becomes a battlefield of warring interests, stalling growth, competitiveness, and progress.

In such situations, it is increasingly difficult to achieve sustainable success without understanding how competing interests influence progress and growth and how those interests can be engaged to achieve mutual advantages.

Dog-eat-dog competitiveness isn't the path to success, and smart business leaders have always understood this. Most businesses in the same region and market space have drawn from a shared pool of expertise and financing, often cooperating informally — and sometimes unwittingly — while acting as competitors in the Sunday business sections. In the Boston area, technicians and supporting personnel who cut their teeth at Digital Equipment Corporation and Wang seeded the rapid growth of many software and hardware startups in New England in the 1990s.

But large-scale, sustainable success cannot wait on accidents. Competing and complementary interests must come together and act to ensure success. Beyond vendors themselves, those interests often include:

• Federal, state, and local governments that control or influence regulations, taxes, insurance, and regional economic development resources.
  
• Universities and community colleges that supply essential workforce skills ... and increasingly act as direct partners to private industry. The ivory tower is a romantic image, but research laboratories and business schools with industry connections are competitive advantages in academia.
  
• Banks, venture capitalists, insurers, and other financial enablers who make startups and continued growth possible ... and safe.
• Labor — including such professional work forces as doctors — some of whom wield considerable power ... or soon will.
• Consumers, whose needs and preferences are often ignored or grossly misunderstood even as vendors and suppliers of key services tout their commitment to innovation and customer service.
  

The Center for Semantic Excellence brings these forces together in facilitated engagements, helps them surface and understand mutually beneficial approaches, provides expertise in economic modeling, and applies Predictive Analytics and Persuasion Analytics to understand how solutions will be acceptedbefore the deployment of costly solutions.