THE CHALLENGE

Building a systematic approach to strategic intelligence

When Tino Klaehne first started working at the Lufthansa Innovation Hub (LIH) in 2017, things looked very different than they do today. The team was still in the early stages of developing their research processes, and their approach was ineffective and time-consuming. 

There was no easy way to store or collect interesting findings in a central location. They needed to develop a more systemic approach to strategic intelligence gathering, so they could scan the horizon and connect the dots more effectively. 

“At the time, our approach to research was really immature. People would Google a few keywords or visit a couple of websites when they had time here and there. Nothing was tracked,” Tino recalls. 

LIH needed an effective way to gather, analyze, and prioritize intelligence from millions of different sources into a single feed. They also needed a system to get alerted when key topics came up, without drowning in the noise of irrelevant data. “We wanted to really professionalize our approach. And we needed to find the right tools for the job.” 

THE SOLUTION

Using Feedly’s AI Engine to research and define the future of their market: Travel and Mobility Tech

LIH was able to go one step further than just professionalizing their intelligence-gathering: They have defined their arena at the intersection of travel, mobility, and tech (TNMT).

TNMT brings together traditionally-siloed interests that cover the entire ecosystem of products and services around the travel experience, from accommodation to space travel. 

By adopting Feedly’s AI engine, Leo to discover and research new market opportunities, LIH gathers and synthesizes intelligence that covers this entire category. They can shape, test, and validate hypotheses that will define the future of travel. 

“It’s strategically powerful to be able to define our own category and be the leaders in what we’re doing. And that’s where Feedly comes in. It allows us to create our own definitions and categories, beyond standard industry definitions. We can build everything around this TNMT concept and see what we find there.” 

“Blurred Travel” and other future trends

When Tino and his team identify a new “fuzzy concept” or broader trend that they want to research and define, they set up a new Feedly Board on the topic and add relevant articles from other boards. From there, one of their analysts will define which keywords to track. They will build a Web Alert and gradually refine it, adding concepts and muting terms to filter out the noise. 

For example, LIH has coined the concept of “Blurred Travel,” a shift they’re seeing as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, where business and leisure travel are increasingly merging. “It’s really hard to search for a term if you’re the one coining it,” Tino says. “To validate our hypotheses, we try to put different concepts together and look at what is coming through Feedly to see what is happening out there.”

Tracking innovation via venture capital investments 

LIH also uses Web Alerts in Feedly to track venture capital investments in travel and mobility tech in order to predict how the industry will evolve. “Venture capital investments are one of our key metrics to determine innovation patterns,” Tino explains. “We want to know where smart people are putting a lot of money, and to understand why it’s happening. It’s a really good proxy indicator for us.” LIH publishes the only regular report with in-depth research on this topic. 

They also track over 3,000 startups to keep an eye out for investment and partnership opportunities with startups in related industries, like sustainable fuel, air taxis, and the creator economy.

Integrating Feedly into their processes and tech stack

Part of what makes Feedly so effective for LIH is the way the team has been able to deeply integrate Feedly into their processes and the rest of their tech stack. 

Tino and the LIH team use Leo Concepts, a collection of machine learning models that continuously read millions of articles to analyze and tag key concepts in real-time. For example, they employ the Partnerships and Funding Leo Concepts to keep a close eye on partnerships that other airlines are forming with startups. This gives them a clearer sense of the direction their industry is heading and what other companies are prioritizing. 

LIH also uses Feedly as the jumping off point for kickstart new projects: Employees combine Leo Concepts in Web Alerts, which track and find relevant content continuously. Through the Web Alerts they’ve set up, the team finds useful content and regularly adds it to Boards. 

When a new project starts, employees search those Boards to see what’s been gathered on the topic and what information is already out there, curated by their team in Feedly. They’ll then create a new Board and connect it to the Slack channel for that project to keep all relevant research in one place. 

Company onboarding at LIH even includes a Feedly tutorial. “That’s how deeply we want Feedly to be embedded in our processes“ says Tino.

THE RESULTS

Faster, more insightful research that looks toward the future

Over the years, LIH’s reputation has grown. Their Travel & Mobility Tech newsletter, TNMT, now has over 10,000 subscribers, including both internal stakeholders and thousands of readers outside the company who rely on LIH’s analysis and research. Without Feedly, Tino estimates that intelligence gathering would take at least 3-5x longer, and wouldn’t be nearly as effective.

Tino’s team is currently starting to build workflows that will make it easier for more teams to set up Feedly and other research tools to gather their own data independently. “We believe this has the potential to become a strategic intelligence layer for the entire Lufthansa Group, built around Feedly and a few other key tools,” Tino says. 

Feedly at the heart of their toolbox

LIH’s confidence in Feedly continues to grow, and they anticipate it continuing far into the future. They recently signed a three-year contract with Feedly so LIH can continue to build their future-focused processes with Feedly as their AI engine.

Even after analysts leave LIH, they continue to choose Feedly, Tino says. Feedly is such an integral part of the strategic intelligence tech stack that at least five former LIH employees have brought Feedly with them to new jobs. 

“Feedly is the core of our toolbox. We appreciate the close collaboration we have, and we really like the improvements and new features they are releasing. We feel like we’re progressing at the same time, together.” 

THE CUSTOMER

DB Schenker, global leading logistics provider

Jacek Pucher is a Global Innovation Manager for DB Schenker, one of the world’s leading logistics providers of land, air, and ocean freight. Jacek helps his company stay up-to-date on the latest developments in logistics – whether that’s by keeping an eye on the competition, identifying new business opportunities, or tracking innovations in the market. 

THE CHALLENGE

Finding an efficient system to scan the horizon for emerging trends and business opportunities

Back in the beginning of 2020, the Global Innovation team didn’t have any tools to help them sift through the flood of information that’s published online every day. 

Monitoring trends and opportunities manually was impossible and impractical. DB Schenker is a global company, and they need to be up-to-date on competitor strategies, events, trends, and what their customers are up to in different markets around the world. 

But if they wanted to continue to be successful in a competitive market, they needed to find a way to scan the horizon efficiently. “Companies operate in an uncertain world,” Jacek explains. “To be able to tackle these uncertainties, you need to be constantly monitoring what is happening around you.” 

THE SOLUTION

Using Leo, Feedly’s AI engine, to build a hub to monitor innovations, trends, competitors, and opportunities

When Jacek first began pitching Feedly to internal stakeholders, his team was quickly overwhelmed with requests for their own newsletters with real-time information.

“Almost right away, we had many colleagues who were interested and asked us to create newsletters for them,” Jacek recalls. “It started scaling quickly, and very soon it got to the point where our Feedly-dedicated team of two wouldn’t be able to do the monitoring for the whole company.” 

So instead, Jacek created an internal scaling model that uses Leo to feed DB Schenker’s innovation, trend, competitor, and opportunity hub and triage intelligence out to the wider company. 

Here’s how he did it:

1. Set up Leo to surface the right information

Feedly’s AI engine, Leo, uses a collection of machine learning models to continuously read millions of articles to analyze and tag key concepts in real time. It’s like having an extremely eager research assistant – with a million times the computing power. 

Jacek set up Leo Web Alerts, AI-powered searches across the web, to track logistics innovations for new developments. He also used Leo’s pre-trained Tech & Scientific Innovation Concept to get immediate updates on emerging trends and new technologies.  

Jacek also set up Leo Web Alerts for the sales teams for DB Schenker’s different business units to help them identify business opportunities. The Leo Web Alerts focused on topics like the supply chain industry, supply chain last mile deliveries, land transport, ocean freight, and warehousing. “It was so simple,” he says. 

2. Curated newsletters disseminate valuable market intelligence information across the company

Once Jacek had Leo set up to surface relevant information, he turned on Team Newsletters. The innovation team curates articles by saving them to a Board in Feedly, and then the newsletters are regularly sent to a predefined list of emails from Boards. 

Then, he pitched the tool’s market intelligence applications to teams across the company to help other teams set up their own newsletters, based on their intelligence needs. 

The innovation team’s first internal customer had a very specific goal in mind: they wanted to use Feedly to stay on top of their customers’ latest investments. “If our customers build a warehouse or a production facility, they are going to need logistics services soon,” Jacek explains. “If we know about that earlier, our sales team can approach our customers to offer our services.”

From there, interest grew quickly, and multiple teams approached Jacek to set up their own newsletters. Pretty soon, Jacek had used Leo to set up 18 different newsletters for teams across the company. 

3. The innovation team creates a scalable framework for surfacing trends   

Now, when a team approaches Jacek to help them gather market intelligence, the process is simple: 

1. Jacek asks the department what keywords and concepts they would like to track. 
2. Then, he creates the Leo Web Alerts for them and asks for feedback on each Web Alert.
3. Together, they refine their Leo Web Alerts to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, so they only receive what’s most relevant to them. 
4. Finally, he trains a team “Feedly editor,” who becomes the owner of the department’s market intelligence – and Jacek is free to go help the next team who wants to gather market intelligence. 

Jacek says, “I assist them in the first few weeks, and I help them publish the first newsletter. After that I hand over the reins and that person becomes responsible for intelligence gathering for their team. They can do their own thing.”

THE RESULTS

A small innovation team with a huge impact across the company

DB Schenker now has an innovation, trend, and opportunity hub, which they use to analyze and distribute content to the wider departments that need to gather intelligence, monitor trends, and spot emerging technologies as they evolve. 

Over 2,000 active newsletter subscriptions

So far, the 18 newsletters have over 2,000 subscriptions, with many employees signing up to more than one. Every new employee gets the option to sign up for Feedly newsletters during their onboarding as well. “I get lots of positive feedback,” Jacek says. “People really value these newsletters and the insights they provide.” 

The “innovation hub” that the team built with Feedly has been so successful that Jacek gathered internal feedback and wrote an internal success story about the initiative.

A collaborative network to break down information silos 

Setting up Feedly as a hub for market intelligence has created an unexpected benefit for the Global Innovation Team, as well: Jacek now has a network of people across the company who can collaborate and lean on each other as resources. He credits the success of this “innovation hub” to the broader team of “Feedly editors” who scan, analyze, and distribute newsletters through Feedly every week for the sales teams within each business unit. 

Jacek reflects on what the Global Innovation team has been able to achieve since starting to use Feedly: “Strategic foresight and scenario building are the innovation tools of the future. And you cannot build scenarios if you don’t know what is happening and what has happened. That’s the big opportunity that Feedly creates for us.”