Ethics
Ethics has been a long-held issue of discussion amongst CI practitioners. Essentially, the questions revolve around what is and is not allowable in terms of CI practitioners' activity. A number of very excellent scholarly treatments have been generated on this topic, most prominently addressed through Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals publications. The book Competitive Intelligence Ethics: Navigating the Gray Zone provides nearly twenty separate views about ethics in CI, as well as another 10 codes used by various individuals or organizations. Combining that with the over two dozen scholarly articles or studies found within the various CI bibliographic entries, it is clear that no shortage of study has gone into better classifying, understanding and addressing CI ethics.
Competitive information may be obtained from public or subscription sources, from networking with competitor staff or customers, disassembly of competitor products or from field research interviews. Competitive intelligence research is distinguishable from industrial espionage, as CI practitioners generally abide by local legal guidelines and ethical business norms.
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Famous quotes containing the word ethics:
“Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Indeed the involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)