entails the study of all segments in the general environment
scanning
Although challenging, scanning is critically important to the firms’ efforts to understand trends in the general environment and to predict their implications, especially for companies competing in highly volatile environments.
Through scanning, firms identify early signals of potential changes in the general environment and detect changes that are already under way.
Scanning activities must be aligned with the organizational context; a scanning system designed for a volatile environment is inappropriate for a firm in a stable environment.
Scanning often reveals ambiguous, incomplete, or unconnected data and
