Despite your reservations, "weak signals" may actually be what you are looking for:

"Strategic Intelligence (SI) focus is on the longer term, looking at issues affecting a company’s competitiveness over the course of a couple of years. The actual time horizon for SI ultimately depends on the industry and how quickly it’s changing. The general questions that SI answers are, ‘Where should we as a company be in X years?’ and 'What are the strategic risks and opportunities facing us?' This type of intelligence work involves among others the identification of weak signals and application of methodology and process called Strategic Early Warning (SEW), first introduced by Gilad,[20][21][22] followed by Steven Shaker and Victor Richardson,[23] Alessandro Comai and Joaquin Tena,[24][25] and others. According to Gilad, 20% of the work of competitive intelligence practitioners should be dedicated to strategic early identification of weak signals within a SEW framework."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_intelligence