Abstract

This chapter offers a review of the literature on competitive intelligence showing how scholars have been preoccupied with deciphering whether or not companies are incorporating CI in their business activities yielding no common definition of CI, equivocal approaches to the CI process, strong focus on data collection, and inappropriate analysis. Therefore, this chapter attempts to address these gaps by providing a more comprehensive definition to competitive intelligence , clearly explicating the CI function, and supplementing the CI cycle with a fifth phase: exploitation. This chapter also draws attention to the disparity between the optimal CI practice and the actual practices of real-world cases. As a result, the value of CI is not only prescribed but also reexamined to offer managers and researchers alike a clear idea of challenges ahead, and the pros an actionable competitive intelligence have on strategic agility.

Introduction

Since the early 1990s, globalization and the consolidation of the new knowledge-intensive organizational paradigms have been redefning competition processes while highlighting the non-price factors of competitiveness, such as quality, sales, design, and service. Moreover, with the advent and widespread adoption of microelectronics and cybernetics, products have become easy to access and even easier to replicate, which eventually jeopardizes the frst mover advantage of companies that once believed in the sustainability of competitive advantage (D’aveni et al. 2010). Tis scenario is also characterized by a greater segmentation of demand and by the increasing volatility of markets, in which uncertainty hampers strategic decision making.