Outcome 4a

This was a project for LIS 884, Big Data and Competitive Intelligence. It is a brief report on the competitive landscape for electric cars at the beginning of 2021, compiling various sources of publicly-available data into an executive summary that could be used by either auto manufacturers, third-party component vendors, or anyone interested in a high-level overview of the EV market.

One of the primary goals of this assignment was to gain practice in absorbing large amounts of information about a topic that was not familiar to the researcher, and organize that information as to accuracy, relevance, and completeness. In a public or academic library, this activity is called “reference service”; in a corporate or business environment, the same activity is “competitive analysis”. Particularly when your primary source is the babble of information available on the public internet, it is important to be able to quickly judge the level of authority of a source, and to synthesize a coherent perspective that can be defended as epistemologically and ethically sound.