Competitive Intelligence and the corporate jewels

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.