Competitive Intelligence and IT, towards a Knowledge-based approach

Although the new Information and Communication Technologies and especially the Internet have provided new, revolutionary tools for the external information gathering, empirical research papers in literature do not report on major improvement in the use of Internet for Competitive Intelligence. This paper tests three aspects of Internet use for CI: Web-sites of competitors, external databases and online forums. Tests are based on a large sample of more than five hundred companies over two consecutive years. More than one half of them still does not use the Internet for any of the three aspects, and only 2, 4% used all of them. The author suggests that this under-development could be changed with a knowledge-based approach, which would allow better evaluation of decision-makers' needs, the role of IT and the expected costs. Finally the paper presents a method to evaluate a company's immaterial assets that can be used to evaluate the development level of Competitor Intelligence systems as well.