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The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

This study discusses the problems of organising competitive intelligence activities in a corporate organisation. Traditionally in many large corporations the collection, interpretation and analysis of competitive information has been assigned to a specialised intelligence or competitor analysis unit in order to exploit the synergy created by centralisation. This organising mechanism has, however, serious shortcomings that are considered in this study. It is debated that this centralised and systematic approach to managing and exploiting competitive information ignores the actual ways that managers and other knowledge workers utilise information resources in their work processes. An empirical study was made in a multinationally operating Finnish forest industry company in order to examine, what kind of competitive information managers and other knowledge workers need in their work processes, what were the most valuable information sources and how this information was actually utilised and communicated inside the corporation. The results of this empirical study are discussed. Some guidelines are provided to improve the process of coordinating and combining both systematically and unsystematically collected competitive information into a coherent organisational mechanism.

To investigate the relationship between performance frontier and operations strategy. A two-level conceptual framework is proposed based on performance elements that act as output/input variables and delimit the scope of the frontier analysis.

The framework proposition is based on the fourth round of high-performance manufacturing survey data. A representative set of variables for assessing performance based on operations strategy constructs is defined through multivariate data analysis techniques. The main method used is the principal component analysis.

The proposed first-level conceptual framework formalizes the relationships between performance frontier analysis techniques and operations strategy, delimiting the scope and the structural definitions. The second-level conceptual framework defines the constructs of the input and output dimensions for frontier analysis studies.

The paper contribution is developed in the gap of market-led orientation to study operations strategy performance frontier since most related literature focuses on capabilities development with a main focus on the resource-based view (RBV) approach. A conceptual framework based on the competitive priorities is therefore proposed to represent the operations strategy in the view of the frontier techniques. The value lies in defining performance measures which are not a straightforward task as the growth of organization competitiveness and complexity require multiple performance measures. A deeper understanding of frontier estimation on the operations strategy context is also provided, contributing to positively influence firms to succeed in the current dynamic competitive environments.

This chapter presents two established pedagogical techniques to increase student engagement, simulations and peer assessment. The use of each technique, its benefits and drawbacks, and how content knowledge and student engagement increase are detailed. While each of the approaches can be utilized independently to create active learning environments, this chapter illustrates the potential to extend these approaches further. An overview of an MBA-level elective on competitive analysis structured around a simulation and peer assessment is presented. The result is a highly interactive and engaging course where the simulation and peer assessments achieve symbiotic benefits. Learning and performance in the simulation is enhanced by the application of competitive analyst reports which are used by peer “clients.” Assessment in turn leads to greater insights to the simulation, and subsequently higher levels of performance on both the simulation and future analysis work. Insights on these instructional methods, their limitations, and potential barriers to adoption are offered with the hope of inspiring others to utilize and experiment with novel approaches for further enhance learner engagement.

Considers the importance of implementing a market orientation, highlighting the difficulty in focusing on competitors rather than customers. Offers an approach to competitive analysis taking into account the validity of both competitor and customer orientations. Argues that this type of method can help managers to maintain or build their position in relation to competition. Illustrates the stages involved in customer‐based competitive analysis with a case example.

With the advance of the Silk Road Initiative proposed by China, it has been a focus of China government to develop strategic emerging industries. The development of strategic emerging industries needs the support of competitive intelligence on many aspects such as strategical planning, policy making, industrial structure adjustment, and technology innovation. However, so far there are few studies toward the competitive intelligence systems for strategic emerging industries. In this article, we focus on a number of issues related to the competitive intelligence for strategic emerging industries in China. First, we conduct a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis on the situations of strategic emerging industries in China, based on which the necessity of building a competitive intelligence (CI) service system for strategic emerging industries is discussed. Next, the authors present a framework of a CI service system for strategic emerging industries in China. The principles, components, working process, and product forms are deeply described. The CI service system proposed in this article consists of a cooperation network platform, three layered organizations, and three systems, which integrates organizations, information, people, network, and service platforms into an ecosystem to offer competitive intelligence supports for government, industry, and enterprises. Finally, the authors discuss a case study of the proposed CI service system for the new energy automobile industry.

In this, the second edition, the experience of actually running a marketing planning process in organisations further updates and revises the highly practical emphasis. The need for vision, how to enunciate it, and the interface between various levels of managers are integrated specifically into the process. Further analysis using the SWOT technique is provided together with enhanced insight into maintaining competitive advantage. Essentially a practical manual on running a planning process, the worksheet method has been well tried and tested. The experience of managers who have implemented the process using the first edition is included to enhance the technique′s dynamism and effectiveness.

The purpose of this survey research is twofold. First, to study and report the process that is commonly used to create and maintain a competitive intelligence (CI) program in organizations. And second, to provide an analysis of several emergent text mining, web mining and visualization‐based CI tools, which are specific to collection and analysis of intelligence.

A range of recently published research literature on CI processes, applications, tools and technologies to collect and analyze competitive information within organizations is reviewed to explore their current state, issues and challenges learned from their practice.

The paper provides executive decision makers and strategic managers a better understanding of what methods are available and appropriate to the decisions they must make and the steps involved in CI undertaking.

The findings of this research provide the managers of CI programs a context for understanding which tools and techniques are better suited to their specific types of problems; and help them develop and evaluate a usable set of tools and best practices to apply to their industry.

Little empirical research has been conducted on competitive intelligence (CI). This paper aims to contribute to the quantitative strand of the CI literature by exploring and validating the theoretical constructs of the CI process.

Data from 601 questionnaires filled out by South African and Flemish exporters were subjected to exploratory factor analysis and construct equivalence analysis between the sub‐samples.

The results showed that the CI process consists of three constructs, while the context in which CI takes place consists of four constructs. This agrees to some extent with the literature. When verifying the constructs for both cultures it was found that all but one CI context construct can be viewed as equivalent in both groups. Bias analysis identified one item in the questionnaire that was biased. Via regression analysis it was also indicated that the context in which CI takes place influences the CI process to a large extent. The research identified size as an important influencing factor in a business' CI process.

Businesses involved in CI should take note that an improvement in their formal infrastructure, employee involvement and internal information processes could enhance their CI capability.

This paper contributes towards the formalising of the constructs of competitive intelligence.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of applying competitive analysis tools to an industry's competitive history. Future strategic planning can benefit from analyzing the competitive past.

Case summary of industry history with application of competitive analysis tool.

Competitive success of firms in an industry is influenced by consistency with the awareness, motivation, and capability framework.

Demonstrating that firms can improve their strategic planning and competitive assessment by analyzing their industry's history using competitive analysis tools.

Managers can see how to apply competitive analysis tools to their industry's past, current, and future situations.

This is the first application of the AMC framework to a historical analysis of the US automobile market. This demonstrates that competitive analysis tools can be applied to historical situations to improve future strategic planning.