What is Competitive Intelligence?

Information about the present and the future is a compulsory must-have for companies which want, not only to survive, but also develop and gain competitive advantages on its competitors. Competitive Intelligence is the process of obtaining information and transforming it into knowledge for a future and valuable decision-making process. Competitive Intelligence techniques first aim at collecting information from the company’ environment with all its aspects (economical, political, geopolitical, social, cultural, legislative, competitors’ behavior…). The next step focuses on analyzing properly the information previously gathered because a wrong information or a misunderstood information can not bring any value.

What covers Competitive Intelligence?

There are two types of Competitive Intelligence: the offensive one and the defensive one. Offensive CI is a process engaged in order to gather information about the company’ external environment. Defensive CI consists in protecting some of  its own data and information which must not be available to the great public and especially to the company’ competitors. Here is a non-exhaustive list of elements which can be used for Competitive intelligence: geopolitical monitoring; benchmarking; legal monitoring; due diligence; marketing watching; market scanning; social monitoring; lobbying; stock exchange monitoring…