Hello,

Today marks the end of a very unique course we were offered in our third semester at the ESCP Business School - Competitive Intelligence and Technology Watch by Prof. Daniel Rouach and Prof. Patrice Santi at the Paris Campus. It was an excellent course and I will be sharing some details about the field and the course in this post. This is a quick post, I will be posting a detailed one in near future.

Information and Data are seen as equivalent to gold and currency today, but it is actionable intelligence that is of real value. Intelligence is what is obtained after processing and digesting information, which is useful for the company in planning the future actions, to build its strategy. From the early days till today, military intelligence and strategy is how states, governments and kingdoms have had an edge over their enemies, competitors and even internal entities (like citizens). Competitive Intelligence is the adoption of military intelligence and strategy into the business world. I think this is yet another example of how certain methods and techniques are invented for military and governemnt purposes, which is then used in the commercial world (other examples include the entire field of Operations Research, Semiconductors, Internet - all were funded and their growth was fueled by governments). As expected, all these fields have transformed the world in unimaginable ways, Competitive Intelligence is performing the same in the business world.

Competitive Intelligence is about gathering information about various entities concerning a company, identifying those bits of information that improves the competitive advantage a firm has. For example, it could be information about its external environment (market dynamics, competitors, suppliers, different stakeholders), about its internal environment (employees, teams and capabilities, management, decision-making etc.,), its products/services, the brand perception and so on. For example, you are a beverage company and you have one main competitor in a particular geography. You always want to be ahead of your competitor in terms of trends, revenues and profitability. How can you ensure that? One way to do that is to know everything about your competitors, to get as much critical information as possible about the competitor and include those factors in your overall strategy and planning. Suppose you get a suspicion that the competitor is expanding its manufacturing capacity, or that they are adding a new plant in another geography. How can you confirm/disprove this suspicion? How do you quantify it? What is the extra capacity being added? What geography is the new plant coming up/planned to come up? What stage is the competitor in, in its potential market entry? Knowing the answers to one or more of these questions will help you plan accordingly and won’t be caught by surprise. As the saying goes, “Getting defeated is pardonable, but not getting surprised”, so I would say this is the foundation of CI. But note that all the information gathering, analytics etc., are all to be performed in an ethical and legal manner, practicing CI is about respecting these boundaries.

Coming to the course, the first two sessions were an introduction to CI - basics of CI, an interesting case study along with a guest lecture by Prof. Ron Waldman. This was followed by another live guest lecture by Mr. Philippe Revardel who has been a CI practitioner for close to three decades now. He spoke about a range of topics - from theoretical foundations of CI (Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Clausewitz’s work on military theory and strategy) to actually implementing the CI process in organizations. In the fourth, Prof. Rouach discussed the importance of Networking - “Network Intelligence”. The final session, today, was about our collective assignments where we present the work we have done over the last few weeks on a particular topic (My team and I worked on the role of social media monitoring for CI, a bunch of teams spoke about AI for CI and another in USA vs. China and role of CI). We ended up doing some classic team work, quite a bit of reading, took interviews of CI consultants and pracitioners to get real insights.

Here are a few interesting resources if you want to learn a bit about CI. One of the first books on Competitive Intelligence is the one by Larry Kahaner who is a pioneer in the genre of military strategy and intelligence. This gave a comprehensive overview of what Intelligence means for Businesses, how it can help them, how it fits into the overall strategy. The book also stresses on what it means to be an analyst, I found this quite interesting. For me, this gave a broad overview of what CI is. Books by Prof. Bonnie Hohhof from the George Washington University are interesting. Her book Starting a Competitive Intelligence Function is great for people who are interested in actual CI practice. When it comes to theoretical foundations, I think books on military intelligence and strategy would create a good foundation. Finally, one place that has lots of information about CI is the Competitive Intelligence Center setup at the ESCP Business School, Paris campus. This is a center for CI research setup by Prof. Rouach an Prof. Santi in recent time, in partnership with the Tel Aviv University. The website provides access to interesting content, research, readings and blog posts on CI by a variety of people (students, academic researchers, consultants, company practitioners). I plan to continually extend this list and keep it updated as I come across new resources.

Finally, big thanks to both the professors for conducting this course because I wasn’t aware of a field like CI prior to the course. It has introduced me to something I find very interesting.

I would be very interested in having a word with you on CI in case this intrigues you. Feel free to reach out on any of the SM platforms. With that, I end this short post. Will see you in the next one.

Cheers!
Adwaith