competitive intelligence

Work plans of systemic application disciplines consist of phases and steps. At this point it is important to stress that, rather than being just a set of instructions for a mechanical execution of assigned tasks, a work plan is a guideline that requires a creative approach to the execution of the application on each task carried out. This creative approach does not mean, e.g., the use of a specifi c method of creative work, but profound knowledge in the discipline of such methods. Some of them can then be applied in certain phases of team work. The execution of each phase is obligatory, and a written report must be made of it. It is true that some steps in a specifi c phase may be skipped, but then a written justifi cation for it must be given. Competitive Intelligence represents a very broad system application discipline that necessarily concerns the general and industrial environment of an enterprise; see (Brychta, Svirák, 2010; Beranová et al., 2010; Landa, Martinovičová, 2010; Svoboda, 2010).

The basis for CI revolves around decisions made by managers about the positioning of a business to maximize the value of the capabilities that distinguish it from its competitors. Failure to collect, analyze and act upon competitive information in an organized fashion can lead to the failure of the firm itself. Whatever strategic framework the firm chooses to embrace for the management of its business, no one element remains more fundamental to competitive strategy than competitive intelligence. Competitive intelligence is more concerned with doing the right thing, than doing the thing right. The goal of a competitor analysis is to develop a profile of the nature of strategy changes each competitor might make, each competitor's possible response to the range of likely strategic moves other firms could make, and each competitor's likely reaction to industry changes and environmental shifts that might take place (Britt, 2006). Competitive intelligence should have a single-minded objective - to develop the strategies and tactics necessary to transfer market share profitably and consistently from specific competitors to the company.

Five, making competitive intelligence in theory (analyse the double mutation on globalisation and the rise of knowledge economy) and making Competitive Intelligence in practice (in firms, clusters or territorial services) contribute to rise a new comportment among the economic actors which names “the coopetition”.

service objects, methods and tools of science and technology, research paradigm diversification. The development prospects of sports competitive intelligence and its enlightenment to China are as follows: 1) Data collection is one of the key elements of sports competitive intelligence. The continuous development of science and technology will bring more high-tech data acquisition software and equipment to this field. At present, the widely used GPS player positioning software, Israe’s SportVU player tracking analysis system, Australia’s Gamebreaker game analysis software, Switzerland’s Dartfish game analysis software and player management software Cronus. In the near future, the upgrading of these technologies and the introduction of new technologies will bring greater room for development in this field. 2) With data, accurate and effective data analysis is needed. The new multivariate statistical model will make the sports competitive intelligence work more forward-looking and predictive, so as to provide coaches with more accurate, effective and timely competitive intelligence services, such as mixed linear model, multivariate logarithmic regression model, neural network model has been gradually introduced into the sports competitive intelligence work. Come on. 3) Sports competitive intelligence workers in China should grasp the changing trend of competition in time and explore ways to quickly extract, correlate and reorganize relevant data from mass data so as to provide users at all levels with efficient and high-quality solutions to meet their decision-making needs.

The marketing and strategic management literature is well-documented regarding the drivers of competitive intelligence (CI) and how they are gathered, its organization, and dissemination through the organization. However, the impact of CI upon the development of other organizational capabilities including marketing capabilities and the performance of organizations has been neglected and very scarce through the literature. Accordingly, this study seeks to investigate the impact of CI categories including market intelligence, competitor intelligence and technological intelligence on marketing capabilities (i.e. market-sensing capability and customer-linking capability), as well as the organizational performance. To this end, structured questionnaire was applied and a survey of 225 persons involved in sales and marketing affairs of insurance companies in Iran was administrated. Results showed that CI categories have direct and significant effect on marketing capabilities and the organization’s performance.

However, the trend, generally observed in the present Competitive Intelligence, rests in the necessity to collect and process more and more information from secondary sources. Consequently, the calls for a higher level of methods of collecting specifi cally used in Competitive Intelligence become more and more conclusive. Moreover, many managers are not capable of understanding, not to say utilizing actively, the notion of intelligence as such. They do not use intelligence but only some additional information bringing nothing new or important for their decision-making, only supporting their conviction that their decisions were and still are correct, even if it is no longer true. This state of aff airs is usually revealed too late.

So it is possible to characterize the first potential clients who might buy the services provided by competitive intelligence. Large international corporations could become such customers. On one side, such corporations have two alternatives of their choice, they are: buying competitive intelligence service from independent companies providing professional services or establish an internal detachment of competitive intelligence as a separate element or as an element working inside the detachment which has already been acting. Anyway it is clear that a lot of preparations are necessary working with large corporations to prove the advantages of the services provided by competitive intelligence (Fleisher, 2001). The available experience is one of the main arguments which could be presented by specialists of competitive intelligence. There are not many institutions preparing trained specialists in the field of competitive intelligence which would currently work. So mostly such specialists having got university degrees in economics, law, management, administration or other fields also having attended special training courses are experienced at working in special operational or secret services. Miller names the experience which specialists of competitive intelligence had got in military and governmental intelligence also working in detachments of analysis of information as an evidence of their available qualification (Miller. 2004). Later on due to the efforts made by the Association of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (ACIP) and some scientists the new professional direction also such profession as a specialist off competitive intelligence appeared. The experience of national intelligence services proves the importance of collecting and analysis of systemic information provided by intelligence for business (ACIP, 2011). Nevertheless it is necessary to remark that the main aim of business is getting profit so it is

Scholars have intensely researched Competitive Intelligence or CI for decades. This topic has been under constant investigation and development concerning business strategy in soaring business performance. This paper critically examines and integrates the Competitive Intelligence Practices by different industries and its relationship on organizational performances. The review employed Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) and utilizes three databases (Science Direct, Scopus, and Proquest) from January 2014 to November 2019. This timeframe and databases were preferred because the articles collected have been through a quality control process and comprehensive source for research performance data and analytics. As many as 666 articles were narrowed down to 20 articles to meet the criteria of this study. Conclusively, six main themes were identified, which are Organizational awareness, CI process, Social capital, CI Challenges, Competitive advantages and Sustainability based on the thematic analyses. Furthermore, another five sub-themes emerge from these key themes. A deduction is made concerning a relationship between Competitive Intelligence Practices and Organizational performance. This paper also suggests conducting more studies in service industries, especially the hospitality industry because of its economic impact and the changing landscape in today's consumer.

The article is aimed at the revelation of the opportunities of competitive intelligence application in business using different ways and tools of information collection. The scientific literature identifies the following stages of CI interpreting it as a process: establishment of the need, evaluation of the need, need fulfilment plan, need funding, long-term plan making. However, companies not always search for the information about competitors’ actions but they might want to seek to protect their information from competitors. Under the conditions of this reverse need, the following stages of CI can be defined: identification of possible threats, evaluation of the threats; assessment of threat level, selection of priorities, funding, and threat elimination. It has been established that the most popular CI information sources are as follows: company’s own knowledge obtained while searching competitors’ websites, participation in fairs and exhibitions. It shows that information is easily accessible, although it is not always reliable or verified. The model presented by the authors of the article enables to identify the main specificities of CI using in big and small - medium business sectors. The main differences between these two sectors include CI funding and access to secret competitors’ information.

intelligence as an academic study field. This article will look at the competitive intelligence peer- reviewed articles reported from 1994 to 2014 in the ABI/Inform database. The research question, which is the major focus of this article, is: To what extent has competitive intelligence as an academic subject field developed over the past 20 years as reported in the ABI/Inform database? The rationale of the article is to provide a lens of the development of competitive intelligence as an academic study field over the past 20 years. Insights would contribute to a generally under-researched body of competitive intelligence knowledge. The rationale of the article is to provide a lens of competitive intelligence research during a period of 20 years through which to appreciate the prevalence of competitive intelligence in economic and management sciences as it is reflected in the ABI/Inform database.

Abstract: Several studies have shown that new curriculum initiatives such as enterprise systems have a predictable lifecycle [1]. This paper looks for trends in competitive intelligence (CI), a relatively new area of study that is beginning to infiltrate curricula around the world. We first examine existing research concerning CI and academia, listing the various approaches through which CI’s role in educational curricula is considered and tracing the history of its emergence. A survey of CI course offerings throughout the US and Australia was conducted in an attempt to identify trends outside a single culture or education system. It shows that CI is an emerging discipline and often appears as an independent degree program rather than just a component of other programs. The methodology used in this study demonstrates how a historical perspective can be used to identify new issues to be considered by curriculum planners.

Similarly, Ernst and Young (2016) conducted a survey on seven key markets in Sub-Saharan Africa comprising of East and West African countries; Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania Uganda, Zambia, Ghana and Nigeria. The study showed that insurance has low levels of penetration across all of the surveyed market. Kenya has the highest figure of 1.90% Insurance premium as a percentage of GDP in 2014, while Nigeria has the lowest percentage of 0.23%. Nigeria has the largest population in Africa, and has experienced an era of high growth in the past few years, fueled by a thriving economy, increased business activities and asset ownership, an emerging middle class, and increased foreign investment. The population has been a major driver in attracting investments into Nigeria especially since the return to democracy in 1999. However, despite the population and increased economic activity, insurance penetration in Nigeria remains among the lowest globally, with about 86% of Nigerians having no form of insurance cover. Furthermore, despite the fact that the Abstract: This paper examined competitive intelligence and employee productivity of selected insurance firms in Nigeria. Survey research design was engaged for the study. The population of the study comprises 3,439 administrators and experts in the thirty-six selected insurance companies that have their headquarters in Lagos-State, Nigeria. Stratified random sampling method was used in selecting the samples. Data were collected via questionnaire and analysed using Pearson moment correlation coefficient. Results showed that competitive intelligence had a positive relationship with employee productivity. The study recommends that managers of insurance companies should put in place good programs to provide employees with the right attitudes, knowledge, communication skills, and authority to handle non- routine transactions.

As previously stated applying the balanced scorecard method requires alignment with the high-level organizational goals and strategies. Senior management at company XYZ has clearly articulated and disseminated these goals. Within these organizational goals, an effort was made to gather usage and impact measures available to the competitive intelligence department. Special care was made to select measurements that could be collected over time in order to glean cause and effect relationships. The CI department of this case study is relatively new and some measurements will serve as benchmark

Competitive intelligence is one of many fields that fall under the intelligence analysis umbrella. The term Competitive Intelligence (CI) is defined as “a systematic and ethical program for gathering, analyzing, and managing information that can affect a company’s plans, decisions, and operations” (Miller, 2009, p. 1209). This idea is different from that of Corporate Espionage (CE), a term that conjures in the mind images of black suited men making clandestine dealings in darkened hallways. A brief but thorough introduction to the concept of CI can be found in Gray’s 2010 article Competitive Intelligence. In this paper CI may also be reefed to as BI- Business Intelligence (BI).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a collection of techniques that allow a site to get more traffic from search engines. Page Ranking is the fundamental concept of SEO and defines as a weighted number that represent the relative importance of the page based on the number of inbound and outbound links. In this paper, I proposed a new type of web page search which is based on the competitive intelligence. It use link-based ranking evolutionary scheme to accommodate users' preferences. I implemented the prototype system and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed web page search scheme.

In response to this Competitive Intelligence “skills-gap” in the public and private sectors, Robert Morris University (RMU) has created the Master of Science in Competitive Intelligence Systems degree program. This paper discusses the conception, development, and implementation of a graduate curriculum in CI/BI. This paper outlines the demand for skilled professionals in the CI/BI industry, as well as the impact of such systems on industry, government, and academia. The Master’s degree program at Robert Morris University is discussed, along with the

It is evident from companies like Apple and Amazon, predictive analytics can provide more certainty regarding shipment ETA’s, reduction of network latency, protection of profit margins, and shortened cycle times. Predictive analytics helpscompanies to adopt Competitive Intelligence techniques to optimize supply chain and logistics across both small and large-scale operations to improve their forecasting abilities and responsiveness via real-time analytics.Predictive analytics as a crucial factor in Competitive Intelligence is increasingly important to Supply Chain Management in making the process more accurate, reliable and at reduced cost.

It is useful to reflect on the various contributions a number of competitive intelligence experts have made to the subject matter. For example, Prescott & Bhardwaj (1995, p. 5) make reference to the fact that a competitive intelligence programme is composed of four interrelated components: administration, personnel, core project tasks, and outcomes. A key point to emerge from the work of Prescott and Bhardwaj (1995) is that senior managers need to think in terms of developing an organizational structure that meets the unique needs of the organization. Other important points to emerge from the literature are that competitive intelligence programmes need to provide an understanding of the industry itself and the type of competitors operating in the industry; areas of vulnerability need to be identified; and the possible moves of competitors need to be evaluated in order to understand how industry dynamics might change (Prescott, 1995). The relevance of a competitive intelligence industry specific approach has been highlighted by Marceau & Sawka (2001).

While providing competitive intelligence services in different countries, it is very important whether the methods used by competitive intelligence could break available in those countries juridical instruments or ethical standards. According to Robert Seal, former specialist of intelligence in the USA, who later founded a non-commercial organization called Open Source Solution (OSS), a large amount of valuable reconnaissance information can be obtained using directly and purposively the sources of information opened for the public. But other authors maintain that although above mentioned remarks are important they can not give complete information how specialists of competitive intelligence assure reliance of potential consumers of the services provided by specialists of competitive intelligence (Negash, 2004). No doubt that consumers’ reliance depends on the sort of informative product which specialists of competitive intelligence are capable to offer (Leana & Rousseau, 2000).

Facets of competitive intelligence gathering have been a part of business for many years, but Prescott states that the systematic orientation towards CI is a fairly recent phenomenon, citing Ecells and Nehemkis. Other sources point to Porter’s work as the foundation of modern CI. However, Underwood maintains that business-related intelligence came into use in the 1960s. and all published intelligence research during this period. The 1980s saw the introduction of formal intelligence gathering functions and in 1986, the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) was founded. Juhari and Stephens note that the technology explosion of the 1990s probably stimulated the notion of CI being something new or revolutionary. The emergence of the Internet and online databases offered an almost overwhelming supply of information.