Abstract
This chapter offers a review of the literature on competitive intelligence showing how scholars have been preoccupied with deciphering whether or not companies are incorporating CI in their business activities yielding no common definition of CI, equivocal approaches to the CI process, strong focus on data collection, and inappropriate analysis. Therefore, this chapter attempts to address these gaps by providing a more comprehensive definition to competitive intelligence , clearly explicating the CI function, and supplementing the CI cycle with a fifth phase: exploitation. This chapter also draws attention to the disparity between the optimal CI practice and the actual practices of real-world cases. As a result, the value of CI is not only prescribed but also reexamined to offer managers and researchers alike a clear idea of challenges ahead, and the pros an actionable competitive intelligence have on strategic agility .
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Talaoui, Y., Rabetino, R. (2017). Competitive Intelligence—A Strategic Process for External Environment Foreknowledge. In: Kohtamäki, M. (eds) Real-time Strategy and Business Intelligence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54846-3_5
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