First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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ISBN 978-1-78630-231-1
Since the Public Economic Intelligence Policy (PPIE) was established in France, there have been a number of conferences, and research groups, as well as the introduction of training reference bases, including publications on the subject. However, a look at its track record shows that since the enthusiasm of its beginnings, routine has prevailed and competitive intelligence has been drawn toward concerns relating to security, leaving behind the notions of foresight, strategy, and geopolitical understanding of business, and of the institutions that they export or not.
In a world currently undergoing complete reconfiguration, where in 10 years’ time France will no longer be the sixth world power, there is a need to reconsider our vision of the reality. We need to “change our way of thinking”, and to no longer analyze the information we find easy to obtain (as is the case today) with references of the past.
We need to re-discover competitive intelligence. The objective of this book is to put competitive intelligence into a modern context of information, as well as of its strategic exploitation. We can no longer afford to remain naïve and must move from the passiveness of theory to action. Acting is, of course, applying the methods and tools of intelligence and competitive intelligence to our understanding of the business environment. But it is also about using this mix to thoroughly immerse ourselves in the methods used by our competitors to better fight on the international market.
With hindsight, we might have the impression that the initial conception of competitive intelligence has been diluted. Big companies, with their financial assets, have more or less successfully developed their own activities in this field. But, at the level of national industrial research and development programmes – clusters, regions, our research institutions, and SMEs and SMIs – competitive intelligence has neither penetrated nor taken its rightful strategic place. At an international level, this discipline has gained more and more followers, especially in the US, but also in China, Germany, South-East Asia, etc.
It is time we opened our eyes, by analyzing errors, being aware both our strengths and weaknesses. If considered to be actionable, competitive intelligence is neither espionage, documentation nor futurology. It is the way to see things more clearly, to develop a constructive and shared vision and to create a real lever for economic and industrial development. Engaged in hyper competition, an evolution is necessary, but it is not a few hundred successful start-ups that will deeply transform our industry or help it quickly reach the threshold necessary to conquer the external markets and therefore reduce the deficit of our trade balance.
The world of tomorrow is uncertain. We might be faced with new challenges posed by terrorism that need to be analyzed and forecast, as well as economic, demographic, and capitalism crises. We need to explore the future to better act in the present. It is these topics that we wanted to develop in the following nine chapters, ranging from geopolitics to competitive intelligence communities of practices, influence, spheres of influence, international cooperation, innovation, territorial intelligence.
We hope that in reading this book, readers will gain new insight and be introduced to the activities of those who already practice, or those who wish to begin, methods and ways of working that break routines and lead to action. As noted by Eric Delbecque, Competitive intelligence (CI) has persisted without ever really evolving; in fact, it has reproduced over the years without significant changes. It is this cycle that we want to break to bring competitive intelligence into a new dimension.
Henri DOU
Alain JUILLET
Philippe CLERC
January 2019
“[…] Because they are open to a movement carrying continual transformations and uncertainties, the societies of modernity have only constantly changing maps, they engage in the immediate history by moving forward by dead reckoning” [BAL 88].
We find ourselves experiencing a “great transformation” in capitalism. The recent unprecedented crisis, as well as continual technological transformation, climate and environment changes, and growing populations have all had significant effects on recent breakthroughs. Companies, states and organizations try to move forward, to find useful ways of “avoiding hazards, the unexpected, and the uncertain”, as well as changing the ways they develop. It is a priority for them to get to know and understand the world around them. Since ancient times, people have been constantly striving to study and understand the world they were living in, even with the most limited means; to build an accurate picture of it by asking intelligent questions [BOT 96].
The state of the contemporary world makes the need for an insightful grasp of situations, or of the situation, all the more important. Globalization means that major actors as new powers in terms of industry and services (Brazil, China, India, Russia, Indonesia) with their businesses, their influence networks, and their expertise are quickly beginning to emerge. But beyond these industrial or economic concerns, we also find new threats posed by mafia networks and terrorists, driving us to reconsider our standards of security and defense. These new participants disrupt the strategic design of our businesses, our states, our territories and their major representative institutions. They all find themselves confronted with different forms of competition and cooperation need under unprecedented terms. This has meant that the division of labor is disrupted and value chains are localized according to comparative advantages and trade opportunities.
Technical, organizational, and social innovation emerges as a new weapon of differentiation, the driving force of the first mover, the key ingredient to creative strategy. The most important factor of this dynamic seems to be linked to knowledge, intelligence, and expertise. Having a firm grasp of these skills means gaining access to economic, technological, social, and cultural advantages as a means of survival. Simply being competitive is no longer enough. More than ever, it has become important to create new keys to understanding, as well as the tools necessary to gain “power” in this new century. Above all, it is important to develop the capacities of collective intelligence of new dynamics, new organizations, threats, and opportunities that will define the new century. These will be the keys to understanding, looking into the future, anticipating, deciding, and acting to avoid the risk of disappearance [TEN 09]. If the prospect of gaining this power is to be maintained, the new discipline of competitive intelligence can act as both a tool and a method for management of companies and organizations, as well as that of public policy.
The present book is devoted to the significance of competitive and strategic intelligence. They are defined as the ability of the individual or organization to effectively interpret their ecosystem to drive their strategy and, of course, to understand and anticipate that of their competitors and partners, and more broadly of all stakeholders. They are sustained by a process of collection, analysis, protection, and dissemination of information and knowledge, but also by their ability to protect their own tangible and intangible assets. This definition of business practice is of course relevant to the conduct of any organization, as well as public policies and their development. This approach consists of the combination of different action of monitoring and analysis, of economic security and influence.
It might be about anticipating evolutions of the new value chain in the automotive industry, aeronautics, logistics, food-processing, or publishing industries; anticipating or following consumer trends; comparing the best practices; hearing the warning signal about a technological breakthrough or the emergence of a standardization, technical or legal strategy, recreating the cultural profile of a particular competing organization, the territorial public policies of its partners or competitors, or analyzing value chains and global strategies of clusters.
We constantly have the need to interact with the economic, social, cultural and technical environment that surrounds us, with public and private actors, with weak signals, “promising facts”, competitive behavior, etc. Competitive intelligence allows us to resolutely adopt a mode of interpretation, to use tools of collection and analysis adapted to each situation and to give meaning to this environment and its transformations. It also means paying close attention to all possible causes of error and to strive relentlessly to master the dynamics of knowledge in order to have “prior knowledge” , to be at the forefront of the action, to avoid a particularly fatal strategic error, “to avoid falling asleep”.
Here the tools of rationality and scientific spirit prove to be insufficient. In this way, we might even be experiencing “mental lying” (self-deception [GOR 17]), committing errors of appreciation or erroneous analyses of the situation due to poor stances of observation or the thoughtless application of immutable decision-making rites which are never questioned. A good system of competitive intelligence requires being effective, the cross fertilization with another “way of knowing”, a mental attitude articulating modes of knowledge close to intuition, wisdom, flair, cautious attention, or curiosity. Moreover, “the invention on an everyday life basis”, as well as for the future, the invention of new ways at the heart of organizations and complex markets, cannot be considered alone. Co-production and “co-management” of intelligence capabilities are needed as well.
This book answers to these unprecedented realities and to the need in all situations of innovative approaches and tools of the decision-maker confronted with their shifting and unpredictable ecosystem/surroundings.
The objective is to provide private and public managers who are facing the implementation of an economic intelligence project, with an educational, operational and pragmatic guide. The same goes for all actors in the public and political spheres that are in their decision-making environment facing the same problems. The book includes methods, tool panels and methodologies. It provides illustrations and case studies. To the “man on the ground” of the public or private sector wanting to implement a project of competitive intelligence – that is to say, the mobilization of intelligence capabilities at the service of development strategies (competitive, social, cultural, international) in the framework of adapted organizations – it provides actionable methods and the guide to identify the best tools, even to build/imagine the tools for each particular situation and thus participate in the construction of the future of the users.
It is therefore aimed at both business managers (start-ups, small businesses, SMEs, large groups, networks) and their teams, associative managers, managers of clusters and animation teams, government officials and those responsible for territorial economic intelligence strategies. It is also particularly suited to research-oriented issues, whether public or private [DOU 16]. It is therefore aimed at “users” as well as “competitive economy” project managers and the various managers of all these organizations.
We are driven by clear ambition and determination, which is to propose an up-to-date methodological book which responds to the challenges of its time and is able to contribute to the construction of the future through the innovative and diverse instruments and organizations it proposes. It must allow decision-makers to enter the new century with the tools to apprehend its complexity without relying on the tools and organizations of the previous century, designed for an outdated world. This ambition and this desire are all the more important as we are in a situation of transition and latency towards a new world [VEL 10] governed by disrupted economic, productive, societal, and environmental issues.
The authors of this book are determined to break with the mimicry of experts [RES 90] and to enter into a dynamic of innovation that gives all the methods and tools presented their originality.
We hope to treat competitive intelligence as comprehensively as possible from the point of view of practice, without forgetting the fundamental theoretical aspects to think the future. By presenting the logic of the competitive intelligence project, we have been able to consolidate a chain of technical tools, as well as thorough approaches and organization.
The authors are at the same time innovators and “reformers” [GUI 05], but also experienced practitioners. We wanted to make a contribution within the framework of “bottom-up, participatory innovation”, that which proceeds from the uses and the practice. We imagine “clever practitioners” who undertake to adapt the methods, and cross the tools to respond to the specificity of the need for situational awareness. “The practitioner/user interprets the methods available, reinvents and participates in their design and therefore regains power over the method”. They rework tools and methods in order to adapt them. The world of applications and digital uses is in this way a fertile ground for “bottom-up and contributing innovations” following on from what was free software in the 1990s, interweaving technologies, content and organizational practices.
We are convinced that competitive intelligence fits well into this approach. It sometimes requires us to use “limited means”, but also sophisticated reassembled and recomposed tools, in order to respond to an urgent need to inform a decision or strategy. This is what we often call strategic mixes: from, for example, the use of the spheres of influence techniques applied by large companies created by Richard D’Aveni [DAV 01], to territorial strategies.
Based on this shared ambition and this approach, the book is divided into separate chapters, each of which presents a particularly necessary aspect when considering our competitive intelligence approach. Some chapters overlap partially as it is necessary to reconsider the approaches and adapt them for today’s world. Competitive intelligence cannot be split up into silos. Therefore, we have also included a list of references at the end of each chapter so that our readers can explore these notions further, whatever prior knowledge they might have. As part of this process, we also strived to provide an international openness by not limiting our references to a single school of thought.
Finally, we must consider that the subject of competitive intelligence is so vast that we cannot, in a single work, present all of its aspects. We have focused on the essentials and those invariants which, in a modern approach to competitive intelligence, must be integrated by actors in the field.
[BAL 88] BALANDIER G., Le désordre : Éloge du mouvement, Fayard, Paris, 1988.
[BOT 96] BOTTÉRO J., HERRENSCHMIDT C., VERNANT J.-P., L’Orient ancien et nous, Albin Michel, Paris, 1996.
[DAV 01] D’AVENI R.A., GUNTHER R.-E., COLE J., Strategic Supremacy: How Industry Leaders Create Growth, Wealth, and Power through Spheres of Influence, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2001.
[DOU 16] DOU H., “Innovation et industrialisation : Un enjeu pour la France”, Vie et sciences de l’entreprise, no. 201, pp. 168–189, 2016.
[GOR 17] GORLIN E.-I., OTTO M.-W., “Truth matters: Cognitive integrity as an intervention for self-deception”, PsyArXiv, 2017, available at: https://psyarxiv.com/72h65/.
[GUI 05] GUILLAUD H., “De l’innovation ascendante”, Internetactu.net, June 1, 2005, available at: http://www.internetactu.net/2005/06/01/de-linnovation-ascendante/.
[RES 90] RESTIER-MELLERAY C., “Experts et expertise scientifique : Le cas de la France”, Revue française de science politique, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 546–585, 1990.
[TEN 09] TENZER N., Quand la France disparaît du monde, Grasset, Paris, 2009.
[VEL 10] VELTZ P., La grande transition, La France dans le monde qui vient, Le Seuil, Paris, 2010.