Talk:Competitive intelligence/Archives/2013

Merge proposal
The article was not merged into Industrial espionage. Fvasconcellos (t·c) 14:14, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Vote for NOT MERGING
Competitive Intelligence is NOT Industrial espionage. While the former is ethical the latter is not. CI is governed by a code of ethics and is an accepted and respected business practice unlike IE which is a punishable offence. CI professionals the world over are trying hard to clear the misconceptions surrounding CI and differentiate it from IE and an influential tool like Wikipedia should not also be a victim to this misconception

Am kool like dat 10:19, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Merging Competitive Intelligence with Industrial Espionage for the reasons given are nonsense. You could use the similar arguments to suggest merging botany with zoology! Both study living things - and use broadly similar approaches to looking at their subject matter. Any division between different living things is purely an arbitrary division as at the cellular level there is very little difference. All cells include a nucleus, a cell role, DNA, chromosomes, rna, and so on. Therefore botany and zoology should be combined into a single topic - biology. (Oh - and let's take it further. Biology should be just part of "science" and should be linked to chemistry....")

I get the feeling that the proposer of a merger has no idea of how modern business works or has some axe to grind regarding Competitive Intelligence (CI). Competitive Intelligence is a very different discipline to Industrial Espionage. Yes - there is overlap. However there is also overlap between biology and chemistry. As to legalities. Competitive Intelligence is a legal discipline in all countries. Industrial espionage is illegal - and subject to stiff penalties. In the US there is the Economic Espionage Act - and similar acts or legislation in lots of other markets.

As to the arguments put:

2) Competitive Intelligence is active information gathering using legal and ethical approaches. In this it is similar to marketing research which also follows legal and ethical approaches for active information gathering. Industrial espionage also gathers information but it uses illegal approaches such as telephone bugs, breaking and entering to steal material, bribery to get information, planting spies in competitor premises and several other techniques which, if caught, lead to court. You just need to look at cases where companies confuse the two disciplines - for example Procter & Gamble going through Unilever's trash cans. P&G ended up paying a large compensation sum to Unilever, and fired the so called consultants and staff involved because they confused CI with espionage.

3) Ethics may be relative. However the law is the law! Also taking an aerial photo is not espionage - it is CI. Breaking into the Chevy factory to copy the plans is espionage. As to trade secrets not having legal protection - that is a libertarian argument saying that copyright should not exist and nor should patent protection. Both are used to protect trade secrets. Similarly putting "for internal use only" on a document states it is a trade secret (subject to discussion by a court - in some cases it may not be). It means it is not public domain. CI only goes for public domain material. Espionage doesn't distinguish. If a trade secret gets into the public domain by mistake or some other legal method then gathering it is CI. Otherwise it is espionage!

4) Give one example of LEGAL and ETHICAL industrial espionage. Just because an ONLINE dictionary doesn't mention this doesn't make it not so.

VOTE: Not to merge. Benaron 20.28, 20 September 2007  —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 19:30, 20 September 2007 (UTC) Japoniano 19:46, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

In this case Consumer Research = Espionage too. Look at what kind of data they gather about us consumers. How is that not espionage according to you? || ||  ||  \/   —Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.239.250.130 (talk) 21:28, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Invented term
I propose this be merged with Industrial Espionage. The author(s) of these two articles have clearly tried to underline the differences, but the only real difference is that one tries to stay within the confines of the law, and the other doesn't. This isn't a very good dividing line--from what I understand, espionage laws differ drastically from country to country. The two activities are the same in every other respect, and (unlike "murder"), "Industrial Espionage" doesn't inherently imply illegality. See my post to the talk page of Industrial Espionage for more. --Lode Runner 02:04, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Absurd! Competitive intelligence is to competitive strategy as market research is to marketing strategy. To suggest the linkage to industrial espionage makes no business sense, and is obviously ethically impaired.
 * 1. Sign your comments please.


 * 2. Espionage is active information gathering. Some types of active information gathering are legal; some types are illegal. It doesn't make sense to give them separate articles based on their legality.


 * 3. Ethics are entirely relative and not up to us to judge. Personally, I don't have the slightest problem with the idea of Ford taking aerial photos of Chevy's latest car in order to copy it.  In my book, trade secrets shouldn't have any special legal protection at all--if they can be obtained without breaking any normal laws (like trespass), they should be fair game.


 * 4. Industrial Espionage is not always illegal/unethical. Most online dictionaries make absolutely no mention of legality.


 * That said, you do have a point that some Competitive Intelligence activities (such as straightforward analysis of publicly available data) might not fall under the definition of Industrial Espionage. I discuss the issue in greater detail on the Industrial Espionage talk page.  You can make the case that the two articles should remain separate (though I believe one should be a subset of the other), but both articles MUST be rewritten to deemphasize ethics and legality. To my knowledge, there is no crime called "Industrial Espionage" (which is not to say that certain SPECIFIC activities might not be illegal in their own right.)  There is no vast consensus as to what is ethical or unethical.


 * It is nothing more than a blatant attempt to redefine the English language to insist that one term refers to "bad" activities and the other refers to "good" activities. --Lode Runner 19:41, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

I tend to agree in that this article does seem a bit out of place at the very least. I esp. note the fact that a reference listed states: ''Although narrower in scope, it is commonly employed as a synonym for Business Intelligence -- Cited Reference Source '' I guese that means I'm for Merge. Exit2DOS2000  •T•C•  14:08, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Researching this subject for my thesis I strongly recommend that one should not merge Competitive Intelligence with Industrial Espionage. Maybe one could have done this in earlier days, when the scope of intelligence actitivies were more focused on competitors. Right now I'd like to describe competitive intelligence in terms of sense making processes where any kind of information all around the company (or the public firms) can be used for enhancing the function of both the whole organization but also every individual member. Espionage, on the other hand, deals with a more limited scope mainly aiming at gaining knowledge about secret information held by competitors. Of course legality is a central issue when it comes espionage, but it's not a central issue in competitive intelligence. I could agree though that the text should be rewritten to deemphasize ethics and legality in CI. Mhe01 11:42, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

VOTE: NO MERGE. I also vote against merging. I've studied the field for years (including attending SCIP and reading their proceedings) in order to defend my organization against both CI and IE, and I agree with Mhe01's reasoning. BI, CI and IE are all quite different things, carried out by different groups and requiring different defense strategies. This is very different from the nearly invisible "cracker/ethical hacker" distinction, where a single individual can switch between the two roles based purely on whether he has permission. CI is not simply the legal/ethical subset of IE. 64.102.56.171 15:46, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

6 Whole People?!
In 1986 the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals was founded in the U.S. and grew to 6.000 worldwide...65.243.175.114 22:23, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

VOTE NOT TO MERGE -Business/Competitive Intelligence have absolutly nothing to do with Industrial espionage which are a illegal activity. Industrial espionage are a criminal act and subject for the police.

Do not merge. And do more homework. www.SCIP.org is a great start. Industrial espionage is a federal crime in the united states. Look up the law. Industrial trade secrets are very tangible legal doctrine. If you don't agree, contact you local congressman. But I would recommend the article be based on legal terminology and state of the professional practice. Not popular semantic misconceptions that distort the respected profession.

CI is a legitimate and honest profession. IE is potentially very illegal and unethical. That is the distinction made by those who make a living doing it.

65.82.126.100 (talk) 15:45, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Vote NOT to merge the two practices of CI and industrial espionage
Competitive intelligence (CI) should not be merged with industrial espionage. The main reason for this is that CI is a much broader discipline of examining threats and opportunities in the marketplace. A certain amount of this involves research on specific competitors, but an equal or larger amount of work is done on economic trends, customer demand, geopolitics, and other strategic issues.

Industrial espionage, by contrast, is uniquely focused on existing competitors, and is defined by the act of attaining information illegally.

There are competitive intelligence practices and practitioners than may come close to industrial espionage, but typically those who use such techniques are quickly exposed and their credibility in the larger CI community is significantly damaged. Since most corporations have a CI function of some sort, they cannot afford the liability of being implicated in illegal activities.

The difference between CI and espionage is not just a question of what kinds of ethics guide you, but in fact are entirely different analytical approaches. As such CI and espionage should NOT be merged as Wikipedia pages.

Tersan (talk) 15:03, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Competitive Intelligence is NOT equivilant to Industrial Espionage
I strongly object to the notion that competitive intelligence (CI) is the equivalent of industrial espionage. CI is a set of ethical research and analytical methodologies. The ethical research is based on secondary research into publicly available and legally obtainable information and ethical primary research in which all interviewed subjects know the true identity, employer and motivation of the interviewer. Industrial espionage employs practices such as dumpster diving, pretexting, social engineering and theft.

CI done well reveals significantly more insight and value than industrial espionage by providing decision-makers with broader and more adaptable insights. Those engaged in industrial espionage leave themselves and their customers vulnerable to misinformation if their targets engage in counterintelligence methods. At best industrial espionage captures purely tactical details and as a "practice" does not possess the rigor to differentiate the worthless from the insightful and the truthful from the false.

I vote NO to merging these entries.

8of12 (talk) 15:54, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Competitive Intelligence is NOT industrial espionage
Quite simply, these two things are different.

First, competitive intelligence is a systematic methodology for analyzing information and turning it into useful intelligence. Industrial espionage has connotations of theft, disruptions of privacy and illegality.

CI is legal and is collected and relies upon information collected thru legal means.

Industrial espionage is illegal and is collected by people / companies that misrepresent themselves or run ruses - both of which are expressly condemned by the economic espionage act.

Lastly, industrial espionage is usually run by state sponsored groups targeting governmental programs or state controlled companies. CI's domain is the business world alone.

68.55.123.41 (talk) 13:51, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Why CI and Industrial Espionage are Not the Same Thing
Argument: 1. Industrial Espionage is specifically defined by the Industrial Espionage Act of 1996. The act narrowly covers “proprietary economic information” further defined as information:

“(A) the owner thereof has taken reasonable measures to keep such information confidential; and (B) the information derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to, and not being readily ascertainable, acquired, or developed by legal means by the public.” [emphasis added]

2. The SCIP code of ethics and all the references listed in the extant wiki entry (as of January 29, 2008) explicitly state that CI practitioners are expressly forbidden from acting illegally.

3. The distinction between doing something legal and something illegal is a categorical distinction most people would be willing to concede. It then becomes fallacious to assert that competitive intelligence is a subset of industrial espionage because one set of activities is legal, the other is not. They are categorically different. As others have pointed out, having a shared end does not equate to having a shared methodology.

n.b., while this argument deals with industrial espionage as defined by the USA, many nations have similar statues [citation needed]

Discussion: While both the competitive intelligence practitioner and the industrial spy may seek information deriving its value “from not being generally known to, and not being readily ascertainable, acquired, or developed… by the public,” one method is legal, one is not. Moreover, as a CI and BI practitioner since 1993, I would claim that there are very few instances where the economic benefit of ascertaining “proprietary economic information” outweighs the consequences of being discovered. This should serve as a reality check; as a friend of mine once put it, “No one wants to wind up on the cover of the Wall Street Journal for the wrong reason.” I am not sure it is reasonable to assume that the CI departments in Fortune 500 companies exist only to put their employers at legal risk.

Moreover, if one considers the broad scope of doing competitive assessment – which may include researching and analyzing not only competitors but also the regulatory environment, market and demographic trends, disruptive technologies, etc. – one quickly realizes that competitive intelligence has a much wider purview than merely guessing what your direct competitor may do next. Industrial espionage in no way encompasses such a wide range of issues.

Finally, I would add that part of the problem, and a part that even our professional organization struggles with, is the term “intelligence.” Rhetorically the term “intelligence” is, obviously, easily conflated with the term “espionage.”  In fact, many European practitioners eschew the term, “intelligence” altogether because of this. Regardless, the term has a great deal of inertia, and I would hope that wikipedia is exactly the sort of place to clarify distinctions such as these.

Vote Not To Merge.

Kieran.michael (talk) 21:22, 29 January 2008 (UTC)Kieran Michael

Vote not to merge
A variety of changes have been made to this article which clearly distinguish it from industrial espionage. This would include new sections added to compare and contrast CI with related fields, clarifications of the SCIP role, and a tone down of some earlier contributions by individuals that appear to want to give themselves credit that may or may not be warranted (I'm offering no opinion on this matter, just stating an observation as backed by the empirical literature on this topic). The addition of the extensive bibliographic references, which were published in a double blind refereed academic journal on this topic, should provide very clear indication that "competitive intelligence" is not the same as "industrial espionage," despite some individuals who refuse to acknowledge the differences between these two activities. They are different by definition, intent, support of professional association, as well as within the scholarship of this field. Earlier suggestions to merge the two, in my humble opinion, clearly do not reflect the four plus decades of scholarship generated by this topic, evidenced further by the earlier lack of references that were developed in support of this entry. This situation has now been rectified and should provide strong evidence that these two fields are distinct ones. Companalyst (talk) 19:22, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Vote Not to Merge
As has been previously referenced, www.scip.org is the professional assembly of (mostly) North American competitive intelligence professionals and clearly differentiates the practice of IE from CI. In fact, SCIP is fairly aggressive in attempting to promote a better understanding of the misguided classification of IE as CI. It is not and it would be counter to the Wikipedia mission to make an attempt to classify CI as a sub-species of the IE taxonomy.

Bdegroodt (talk) 05:51, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Needs more examples and details
The article (as currently written) lacks details and examples that would help a novice reader to understand what competitive intelligence actually is. The article dwells on high level descriptions and never grounds them in tangible examples. The article makes a *lot* of references to notable practitioners and their publications. This comes across as marketing plugs for those people and products. While I think it's great that those people provide more details and instruction that readers have to pay for, the wikipedia article could really be improved by providing a bit more details and examples itself. These details would not detract much from the value of the external commercial sources of information. 199.181.167.161 (talk) 19:34, 12 April 2009 (UTC) Stuart

Articles that should be merged into this one (or deleted)

 * Environmental scanning
 * Competitor intelligence
 * Commercial intelligence
 * Competitive analysis
 * Competitor analysis

MaxPont (talk) 20:45, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Four Intelligence Categories
The article talks about four categories: Strategic, tactical, adhoc and continuous but ends up describing and explaining only two of those mentioned. I believe it would be helpful to explain what adhoc and continuos intelligence are. Joernano (talk) 15:31, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Merge from Creative competitive intelligence
I merged this myself, but someone registered an account to revert it - the article Creative competitive intelligence appears to just be quotes from three people musing on how you can apply competitive intelligence creatively. I'm not sure it merits its own article (or even an article at all, as the quotes don't even seem to be talking about a coherent concept). What do other editors think? --McGeddon (talk) 08:40, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree. There's some odd work going on here, that looks like advertising for a specific concept (see this change to Creativity). I suspect that user:Erik Boldrin and user:152.81.114.84 are the same person.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 16:19, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Copyright problems
Recently added:
 * A more strategic view of CI regards it as the proactive and ongoing analytical process that gathers and transforms disaggregated future-looking market and competitor data into relevant actionable knowledge that can be readily put to use by key decision-makers of the organization.

Existing content on http://on-competition.com/what-is-competitive-intelligence/:
 * ... a more strategic view of CI. I define it as the proactive and ongoing analytical process that gathers and transforms disaggregated future-looking market and competitor data into relevant actionable knowledge that can be readily put to use by key decision-makers of the organization.

The contributor claims to be the author but even so, a direct copy-paste such as this must either be in quotes or significantly reworded. In this instance there is no call for a quotation, so rewording would be required.

Furthermore, I do not think this view of CI differs significantly from the lead sentence:
 * the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.

Joja lozzo  03:32, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

1. I added the page on on-competition with your user name to verify that I'm the owner of on-competition http://on-competition.com/jojalozz 2. "the general rule, do not copy and paste text from other sources" is mostly because of copyright issues which this is not the case as I'm the owner of the content. 3. As a CI professional with 9+ years of experience there is significant difference in the statement that I added and the lead sentence. One is generic definition of CI which reflects the view of some CI professional the other one is a strategic definition that have significant implication on how you run a CI function and how to approach CI. Salcar (talk) 04:54, 27 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Cool. :-)
 * Even if you are the owner of the content, we should not copy and paste but reword it. Copying text is considered plagiarism even if it's your own text since this article is not your article, it's a collaborative effort belonging to the Wikipedia project. We could put the text in quotes and attribute it to you but there's no need for that. Once we agree on how to improve the article, then please find new ways to word the your ideas.
 * So that I understand what you have to offer, please explain the difference between your sentence and the lead sentence in more detail.
 * I am glad you have joined us here. Expert knowledge is a great asset for the project.
 * Please be careful about conflict of interest issues, e.g. please do not link to your own web site.
 * Thanks, Joja  lozzo  05:17, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Re point 3. the main difference are the keywords I highlighted in bold below. I imbedded the link to the full article for those individuals that want to read more about about this strategic point of view. Salcar (talk) 05:37, 27 November 2012 (UTC)
 * First, CI is proactive and ongoing: To be effective, the CI professional needs to anticipate intelligence requirements and gather information before it is in the public domain. Intelligence-gathering should not be done on a project basis; instead, it should be continuous. That is the best way to maximize resources and ensure to get early warning that things are changing.
 * CI is also an analytical process: Competitive intelligence has to be a well-defined process in order to be successful. A defined process will help different stakeholders understand what CI is within the organization. It will help define the resources CI requires, and it will help align different stakeholders. It is more than just analysis.
 * CI is future-looking: CI must be focused exclusively on future-looking information. “Future-looking” means it comes from non-public sources. Non-public information gives you a competitive advantage; it is proprietary knowledge, and this type of intelligence puts your organization in a proactive mode. If it is not future looking then is market research and not CI.
 * CI is actionable knowledge: In order to make a business impact, the CI process must generate action that allows the organization to be successful in the marketplace.
 * CI is for decision-makers: The CI process should be built around the intelligence needs of the people making decisions. The CI professional has to ensure that the intelligence will support key upcoming investment choices.
 * Yes, I saw that in the blog. I was asking for an analysis of how your model differs from the lead sentence. From my perspective neither your sentence nor the lead sentence communicates much of what is expressed in your longer description. They are both lists of buzz words that require interpretation. We could view the lead sentence as describing CI as a proactive and ongoing analytical process ("defining, gathering, analyzing"), providing actionable knowledge (" intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment"), for decision makers ("support executives and managers in making strategic decisions"). While the lead doesn't explicitly include forward looking it does not exclude it either, and the third paragraph starts with "early identification of risks and opportunities in the market before they become obvious".


 * As you say, the current lead is a more generic approach to the subject which is appropriate since this article is not about your model but about the subject in general. I think that before attempting to fit your personal approach into the article, you could make a significant contribution by editing and refining what we have already with the purpose of explaining the field in general. That may help us avoid the pitfalls of your interest conflicts. Joja  lozzo  15:03, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

I was just trying to make an honest contribution. If you see this as a conflict of interest and that there is no contribution to the article then keep it the way it is. There is no point in editing and refining what is already there when it is taking so much time to add a couple more sentences and when those sentences are not consider to be a valid contribution. I hope you find the help needed to improve this article. Salcar (talk) 23:34, 27 November 2012 (UTC)