Strategic Competitive Intelligence Research Articles

Challenges for strategic competitive intelligence at the corporate level

Strategic competitive intelligence is a necessity for corporate decision making in today's highly complex, “hypercompetitive” global markets, where current and potential rivals are encountered on multiple levels of competition. Key strategic decisions regarding diversification, downsizing from past diversification, and strategic alliances must be based on sound assessments of the competitive environment. Strategic CI, for example, can provide a basis for assessing the opportunities, necessities, and risks of present or future alliances, for making decisions regarding appropriate forms and intensities of present or future cooperative arrangements, and to choose among stable or variable forms of cooperation. Similarly, strategic CI can provide relevant knowledge concerning a firm's strategy-related, structure-related, and culture-related challenges with respect to diversification. D'Avini's framework of four cooperative arenas highlights why, with respect to the new competitive realities, corporate-level strategy requires dynamic, multi-level, and multi-arena competitive intelligence to identify and analyze probable threats and opportunities on all levels, and in all arenas, of competition. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Challenges for strategic competitive intelligence at the corporate level

Strategic competitive intelligence is a necessity for corporate decision making in today's highly complex, “hypercompetitive” global markets, where current and potential rivals are encountered on multiple levels of competition. Key strategic decisions regarding diversification, downsizing from past diversification, and strategic alliances must be based on sound assessments of the competitive environment. Strategic CI, for example, can provide a basis for assessing the opportunities, necessities, and risks of present or future alliances, for making decisions regarding appropriate forms and intensities of present or future cooperative arrangements, and to choose among stable or variable forms of cooperation. Similarly, strategic CI can provide relevant knowledge concerning a firm's strategy-related, structure-related, and culture-related challenges with respect to diversification. D'Avini's framework of four cooperative arenas highlights why, with respect to the new competitive realities, corporate-level strategy requires dynamic, multi-level, and multi-arena competitive intelligence to identify and analyze probable threats and opportunities on all levels, and in all arenas, of competition. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Competitive intelligence and strategic group decisions: A new diagnostic tool

The use of competitive intelligence (information on competitors, technology, market developments, etc.) in strategic group decision making is of great interest to practitioners and strategy researchers alike, yet relatively little is known about the availability of competitive intelligence and the actual need for intelligence by decision makers. This article develops a decision-dependent input/participants matrix which is the basis for the derivation of seven intelligence availability and demand indices. The indices are diagnostic tools to help companies design and monitor strategic competitive intelligence gathering and distribution. They constitute part of an organizational intelligence support system designed to strengthen group decisions such as launching a new product. Practitioners can use the indices to diagnose problems countered by groups of decision makers in the intelligence gathering and distribution activities of organizations, and researchers can use them in the systematic study of this new field. An application of the tool to a pharmaceutical company is described.