A current awareness resource for students & faculty members in Business & Economics
New! Shortcut to key strategic insights on Canadian and US industries via IBISWorld
Published by Mark BodnarOur already-popular IBISWorld database recently added another useful feature: iExpert Summaries.
iExpert Summaries are 4-6 page summaries of the full report, with a SWOT analysis and industry questions included at the close of the report. These questions act as a great research starting point for industry research. They are available for all of IBISWorld's 1300+ US industry reports, as well as the 425 Canadian industry reports. (Not available for the China or Global reports at this time.)
Frankly, if they were simply brief overviews along the lines of a typical executive summary in a business report, I wouldn't be quite so excited about the iExpert Summaries. I was pleased to see that they avoided large blocks of text and instead extracted colourful infographics from the main industry reports to tell the story about each industry's product segmentation, major markets, cost structure, etc. making it much easier to scan for strategically useful insights. Having said that, my favourite part of the iExpert content was more text-focused: the end of each summary provides a very brief look at that threats and opportunities facing the industry, followed by a more detailed discussion of key external impacts and internal issues currently affecting that industry, along with related questions that a manager or analyst should consider to deal with such impacts and issues. What busy strategic manager doesn't want such a succinct overview? You can access the iExpert Summaries directly through new categories on the initial IBISWorld landing page (after logging in as an SFU researcher), or by clicking the lightbulb symbol found at the top of each full report:
Don't forget that IBISWorld is just one among many sources for industry information available for SFU researchers. Check out our Industry Surveys research guide for more suggestions. -- MarkB On behalf of your Bus/Econ librarian team:
- Mark Bodnar (Business – Burnaby): mbodnar@sfu.ca
- Megan Sorenson (Business – Vancouver): megan_sorenson@sfu.ca
- Ania Dymarz (Business – Surrey): adymarz@sfu.ca
- Carla Graebner (Economics – Burnaby): cgraebne@sfu.ca