Competitive Intelligence is researching the environment a (usually private) business lives in, in order to influence its emerging strategy for business development. In the past, Competitive Intelligence would be limited to the initial comprehensive Marketing Plan that would kick off an enterprise. Today, in a near schizophrenic business atmosphere, companies are compelled to use every bit of information they can lay their hands on, in order to survive the future.
Information regarding daily activities of direct competition is valued highly, especially in the field of Information Technology and marketing in general. However, the scope of Competitive Intelligence is as varied as the personalities of those that sanction it. This includes details about employees, mergers, software acquisition and creation of proprietary software, sales data and forecasts.
The legal and ethical parameters of this field are thought to be stretched in undetectable ways by its practitioners. Companies are not just concerned about those in the same business- they are watching entities that are benchmarked for benefits that they would like to offer to their customers. This expensive and time consuming investment is indulged in with a view to simulate the 'best practices' to achieve similar success. A bicycle manufacturer, for example, would consider a Computer Games manufacturer competition- even though they each sell different products and because they want a slice of the same dispensable income their clientele has per unit of time.
There is some amount of public information that makes for cooperative information sharing. However, successful business owners sense that strategic plans are not made public until it is too late to match the event in one's own company. A Competitive Intelligence team is also only as utilitarian as the quality of the predictions made to upper management within a company.
Often, this key management function is outsourced and the information gathered is shared only at the discretion of a few top level managers with anybody at the operations level. As a result, companies magically seem to come up with similar products within days or weeks of each other. Unlike contemporary innovations across huge geographic divides in cultural anthropology, the similarities we see among businesses today can often be attributed to a prosaic, albeit, equally exciting field called Competitive Intelligence.
