Historic Development
The literature associated with the field of competitive intelligence is best exemplified by the detailed bibliographies that were published in the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals' refereed academic journal called The Journal of Competitive Intelligence and Management. Although elements of organizational intelligence collection have been a part of business for many years, the history of competitive intelligence arguably began in the U.S. in the 1970s, although the literature on the field pre-dates this time by at least several decades. In 1980, Michael Porter published the study Competitive-Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors which is widely viewed as the foundation of modern competitive intelligence. This has since been extended most notably by the pair of Craig Fleisher and Babette Bensoussan, who through several popular books on competitive analysis have added 48 commonly applied competitive intelligence analysis techniques to the practitioner's tool box. In 1985, Leonard Fuld published his best selling book dedicated to competitor intelligence. However, the institutionalization of CI as a formal activity among American corporations can be traced to 1988, when Ben and Tamar Gilad published the first organizational model of a formal corporate CI function, which was then adopted widely by US companies. The first professional certification program (CIP) was created in 1996 with the establishment of The Fuld-Gilad-Herring Academy of Competitive Intelligence in Cambridge, MA.
In 1972 the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) was founded in the U.S. and grew in the late 1990s to around 6000 members worldwide, mainly in the U.S. and Canada, but with large numbers especially in UK and Australia. Due to financial difficulties in 2009, the organization merged with Frost & Sullivan under the Frost & Sullivan Institute. SCIP has since been renamed "Strategic & Competitive Intelligence Professionals" to emphasise the strategic nature of the subject, and also to refocus the organisation's general approach, while keeping the existing SCIP brandname and logo. A number of efforts have been made to discuss the field's advances in post-secondary (university) education, covered by several authors including Blenkhorn & Fleisher, Fleisher, Fuld, Prescott, and McGonagle, among others. Although the general view would be that competitive intelligence concepts can be readily found and taught in many business schools around the globe, there are still relatively few dedicated academic programs, majors, or degrees in the field, a concern to academics in the field who would like to see it further researched. These issues were widely discussed by over a dozen knowledgeable individuals in a special edition of the Competitive Intelligence Magazine that was dedicated to this topic. In France, a Specialized Master in Economic Intelligence and Knowledge Management was created in 1995 within the CERAM Business School, now SKEMA Business School, in Paris, with the objective of delivering a full and professional training in Economic Intelligence. A Centre for Global Intelligence and Influence was created in September 2011 in the same School.
On the other hand, practitioners and companies regard professional accreditation as especially important in this field. In 2011, SCIP recognized the Fuld-Gilad-Herring Academy of Competitive Intelligence's CIP certification process as its global, dual-level (CIP-I and CIP-II) certification program.
Global developments have also been uneven in competitive intelligence. Several academic journals, particularly the Journal of Competitive Intelligence and Management in its third volume, provided coverage of the field's global development. For example, in 1997 the Ecole de Guerre Economique (School of economic warfare) was founded in Paris, France. It is the first European institution which teaches the tactics of economic warfare within a globalizing world. In Germany, competitive intelligence was unattended until the early 1990s. The term "competitive intelligence" first appeared in German literature in 1997. In 1995 a German SCIP chapter was founded, which is now second in terms of members in Europe. In summer 2004 the Institute for Competitive Intelligence was founded, which provides a post-graduate certification program for Competitive Intelligence Professionals. Japan is currently the only country that officially maintains an economic intelligence agency (JETRO). It was founded by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) in 1958.
Accepting the importance of competitive intelligence, major multinational corporations, such as ExxonMobil, Procter & Gamble, and Johnson and Johnson, have created formal CI units. Importantly, organizations execute competitive intelligence activities not only as a safeguard to protect against market threats and changes, but also as a method for finding new opportunities and trends.
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