Competitive intelligence: History, importance, objectives, process and issues

Competitive intelligence deals with the competitive environment of a company. Several studies have been conducted on competitive intelligence domain but there is no empirical work that gives a complete implemented competitive intelligence solution. This paper presents an overview of competitive intelligence studies and highlights the issues towards developing a complete CI solution. A new conceptual model which details the collection phase and incorporates the anticipation of the competitor decisions is proposed. To better solve the CI problem, the paper proposes to integrate the ability of multi-criteria decision aid methods to manage conflicting criteria in a complex environment, with the ability of artificial intelligence in managing and extracting large amount of technical data/information in such a context.