1. What is CI?
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…
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