COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE (CI)
The action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.
- An ethical and legal business practice, as opposed to industrial espionage (illegal).
- Focused on the external business environment--rivals, clients, economic⁄regulatory matters, etc.
- Improves strategic decision-making through understanding the competitive environment.
- Information gathered, converted into intelligence, and utilized.
- Meaningful, actionable, and providing “insight about change and future developments.”
Intelligence is both a process and a product; an analytical product that transforms tumultuously gathered competitor and market information into actionable knowledge about competitor’s capabilities, intentions, performance and position as well as the final product of that process.