New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: How to get industry insights? / Meet people outside your bubble?

Ask HN: How to get industry insights? / Meet people outside your bubble?
3 by nielsole | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Ask HN: How to get industry insights? / Meet people outside your bubble? I am very interested in the inner structure and dynamics of industries. In the last years I got to know a few industries through old friends and school buddies. Unfortunately the circle of my peers seems to narrow in on computer science from year to year and it becomes more rare to get such insights. The industries can be as trivial as german christmas markets. For example:
Are the stands organized business or individuals?
How much revenue do you expect on a weekday?
How much value is captured by the organizer of entire markets (probably the district/city?)?
How much money is spent on marketing/advertisement? Ultimately I am also looking for startup ideas:
Where in the value chain are inefficiencies? For what reason are they there? (precursor to Peter Thiels famous “thing you know, that no one else knows/believes”) The answers to some of these questions are not publicly available. I spent the day today in the library and found that information in books on these topics is often outdated or nonexistent.
This might be due to this type of information often being considered a company secret (e.g. revenue per day) or the data is never collected because of its perceived triviality (business size of christmas stands) How do you approach these questions? Ultimately this is a question on networking. How do you meet people from different industries outside of your cirlce?