Competitive Intelligence Review最新文献

Remarks concluding the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals' Symposium on the Economic Espionage Act of 1996: The Impact on Global Competitive Intelligence for Business. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The end of the Cold War shifted strategic and tactical foreign policy priorities from traditional superpower and client concerns to those reflecting national economic competitiveness, especially commercial and technology-related information. But while the threat of illegal industrial espionage has increased, so too has the new threat of legal—and systematic—competitive intelligence (CI) efforts by foreign and domestic competitors. Corporate efforts to protect proprietary information, the author argues, have tended to follow the classified-protection model developed to thwart clandestine or illegal intelligence operations, leaving firms unprepared to defend against an organized CI collection effort that analyzes information routinely gathered in the course of the target company's daily business activities. Companies must continue to use physical security against illegal threats while redirecting their thinking to CI protection strategies. It is important to realize that your company will and should lose information if it is effectively carrying out its business operations, and to shift from risk avoidance to risk management. The defensive key is to identify what is absolutely critical for the firm's survival or competitiveness—the “corporate jewels”—and then take action to limit their vulnerability to competitor CI collection. The military's five-step Operations Security (OPSEC) approach for assessing risk and establishing countermeasures can be adapted for competitive intelligence. Also, thinking about counterintelligence should move away from the government-clandestine model to an approach based on Counter-Competitor Intelligence (CCI)—seeking to learn during routine CI activities what intelligence activities competitors are directing at your company, and to analyze any damage. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

A survey of CI professionals reveals that the primary use of the Internet in competitive intelligence involves reducing costs and improving the quality of primary and secondary information. However, there is also significant interest among CI practitioners in using the Internet to collect information that will help generate additional revenues, including data related to the development of new products or services. A substantial number of respondents believe that such uses of the Internet can help the company to recognize the value of the CI function. Many CI professionals also are involved in helping create a strategic plan for the Internet and/or developing company or department Web sites. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Failure to understand the social and political dynamics of countries and regions is one of the primary causes of business failures within overseas markets. In the past several years, it has cost companies billions of dollars in wasted time, effort, and investment. Succeeding within the “New World Disorder” requires that executives and managers bring new multi-disciplinary skills to their analyses of how societies react to foreign investment and change. Successfully developing areas share specific characteristics that most societies do not possess, and are unlikely to gain within any reasonable time period. In consequence, metropole development—rather than global, regional, or national development—is the rule. A key skill will lie in correctly predicting where growth is likely, and where it is not. Developing useful insights from appropriate analytical skills requires both comparative and case study competencies, a good sense of history, and a commitment to spending as much effort on mastering relevant social, political, and cultural knowledge as one spends on product development. Since the post-Cold War world is very different from the rest of the 20th century, failure to understand the nature and consequences of these differences will generate business failure well into the 21st century. Successful companies will be those that integrate traditional business skills with social science competencies to produce winning analyses of change. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Typically, there is little linkage between a firm's intelligence collection and security functions. Nevertheless, counterintelligence measures often are relegated to security personnel, if they're thought about at all. But while security seeks to protect a firm's assets by a combination of policies, procedures and practices, counterintelligence, properly understood, aims to engage and neutralize a competitor's collection efforts through a variety of imaginative, flexible, and active measures. An organized counterintelligence approach, such as the Business Intelligence Collection Model^SM described here, can help ensure CI/counterintelligence integration. This process involves defining what needs to be protected, for how long, and from whom; assessing the rival's CI collection capabilities; testing and managing your firm's vulnerability to the rival's collection methods; developing and implementing aggressive countermeasures (including disinformation); analyzing the results; and integrating this information with data from the CI side of the process, thereby providing management with a more complete intelligence picture of the marketplace (revealing what the competition is trying to collect, for instance, is often an early indicator of where they're headed as a company). A case study is provided. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.