Abstract

One of the hottest topics in business today is competitive intelligence, the effort by a company to obtain enough information about its competitors to give it a strategic edge over them in the marketplace. During the past decade, a number of books have been written in this country advising business managers on how to mine various sources of public information for this purpose: trade shows, public speeches by company executives, articles in obscure journals, and government agencies like the Food and Drug Administration. Some large companies have even hired former FBI and CIA personnel to help them develop more effective in-house intelligence-gathering capabilities