Marketing strategy begins with customer and competitive
intelligence. However, in sharp contrast to customer
intelligence, there is little research on how
competitive intelligence (CI) is actually generated
within an organization. The absence of this knowledge
makes it difficult to identify ways to improve the CI
generation process. Drawing on both depth interviews
with full-time personnel who conduct competitive
intelligence and academic literature in related fields,
the authors derive a novel conceptual framework that
describes three interdependent phases of the competitive
intelligence generation process: (1) organizing for
competitive intelligence, (2) searching for information,
and (3) sense-making. pdf 2004
