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The paper seeks to explore competitive intelligence as a complex business construct and as a precedent for marketing strategy formulation.

In total, 1,025 executives were surveyed about their companies' usage of competitive intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination as well as their perception concerning certain organizational characteristics.

This research develops and tests intelligence as a precedent to marketing strategy formulation, revealing multiple phases and contributing aspects within the process. It also discovers that the practice of competitive intelligence, while strong in the area of information collection, is weak from a process and analytical perspective.

While the sample was indeed a census of Canadian technology firms, care must be taken in generalizing the study beyond this industry, and certainly beyond the Canadian borders. Also, the questionnaire used only dichotomous variables (yes/no answers), which limited the testing that could be done.

Using these results, competitive intelligence departments and professionals can improve efficacy within their approach and execution strategies.

The contribution of this paper is two‐fold. It reveals many of the “state‐of‐the‐art” levels of practice within current competitive intelligence efforts, and it proposes a model of the intelligence process.

This paper examines the connection between environmental scanning for market intelligence, organizational culture and generic strategies. The generic strategies, based on the Miles and Snow typology, are related to the organizational culture types developed by Deshpande et al. An enhanced model of the one proposed by Deshpande et al. is presented. By providing a more complete model, it is possible to more accurately represent an organization’s interaction with its environment with respect to its generic strategy and scanning approach. Propositions are presented pertaining to the type of scanning approach utilized by organizations in each quadrant. The paper concludes with planning implications for each quadrant.

Noting that accurate information needs overlay the entire intelligence cycle from planning to reporting, the authors propose a new concept to fine‐tune the process of electronically gathering information. Since most tools are nondiscriminatory in information gathering, a new concept is needed to assist managers at all levels of the organization. The proposed multi‐class interest profile (M‐CLIP) provides the capability of expanding the representation of interests to reflect the assorted areas that make up a manager’s information needs. The M‐CLIP covers project, organizational, and industry class interest areas. Each area is customizable to make the search pertinent to the user while considering the need for both recall and precision. Supporting features, such as profile expansion, and fine‐tuning are also considered.

The relationship between internationalization efforts of businesses and resulting performance has long been debated in the international marketing literature. Specially, under the environmental uncertainty, perception and experience of managers are important for internationalization performance.

This study proposes an integrated research framework and mechanism between perceived international risk and international marketing performance, adopting international experience as moderator variable and entry mode as mediating variable. Survey was conducted on 1,612 managers of 420 Chinese international enterprises by email and received 463 valid questionnaires.

The results show that there is a significant negative relationship between perceived international risk and international performance. Direct influence and perceived international risk have an indirect influence on international performance through entry mode; the influence on the international performance from perceived international risk is moderated by international experience, the regression coefficient between perceived international risk and international performance is the quadratic function of international experience.

Different from previous literature, this study found the complex relationship between risk and performance.

The purpose of this chapter is to review and synthesise the available evidence for the health benefits of walking. It follows a non-systematic evidence review and finds that the evidence base for the health benefits of walking is growing. Increasingly we are finding strong evidence for the beneficial effects of walking for both individuals and populations. More evidence is required on how to better understand the health outcomes associated with walking and how to promote long term increases in walking behaviour. Systematic reviews of specific health benefits remain rare. Walking should be promoted in all population groups regardless of age or sex. There are currently few existing integrative syntheses of the physical and mental health outcomes associated with walking and this chapter aims to help fill that gap.

This paper aims to explore the impact of competitive intelligence (CI) practices on the firm's performance in the emerging market context of India. The paper seeks to answer the following questions: do CI activities have an impact on the market performance of Indian firms? If so, what are the macro and micro environmental drivers of CI for Indian firms? How are CI activities organized within Indian firms? How is the usage and dissemination of CI taking place within Indian firms?

The study used a stratified sample developed from a variety of mailing lists focusing on Indian firms. The study employed a cross‐sectional, survey‐based methodology.

The study identifies two key aspects: Indian firms that exhibit higher levels of CI activities indeed achieve better financial performance results; and the current level of CI activities in Indian firms is at a moderate level, thereby suggesting an opportunity for using and implementing more sophisticated CI techniques.

The findings of this study should assist local and foreign managers in having a more informed understanding of CI activities in the Indian marketplace. Additionally, these findings provide directives to managers regarding the untapped opportunities and potential that CI can offer in a highly volatile and rapidly changing market scenario.

This is the first study that empirically investigates the relationship between the level of CI activities and firm performance in an emerging market context. It is also the first study of its kind that explores the current state of CI practices in the Indian market.

The study investigated the effects of two mental training strategies separately and combined on subjects’ shooting performance following an endurance march. Further, the study examined the suitability of a ten‐session training programme for the police force. On Trial 1, following a three hour march, 44 subjects shot 25 rounds. Subjects were then randomly assigned to four groups (biofeedback, relaxation, combined biofeedback and relaxation and control). After two weeks of mental training, subjects performed both tasks again on Trial 2. A repeated two‐way ANOVA indicated a significant improvement (p < 0.01) in shooting accuracy by the combined group. Suitability for this mental training programme was strongly supported by the experimental groups (71 per cent to 80 per cent). Subjects were generally better able to relax and focus. They were also more aware of their body and their physiological control. Results are discussed in light of potential benefits for cognitive strategies in precision tasks following endurance activities.

The business intelligence (BI) research witnessed a proliferation of contributions during the past three decades, yet the knowledge about the interdependencies between the BI process and organizational context is scant. This has resulted in a proliferation of fragmented literature duplicating identical endeavors. Although such pluralism expands the understanding of the idiosyncrasies of BI conceptualizations, attributes and characteristics, it cannot cumulate existing contributions to better advance the BI body of knowledge. In response, this study aims to provide an integrative framework that integrates the interrelationships across the BI process and its organizational context and outlines the covered research areas and the underexplored ones.

This paper reviews 120 articles spanning the course of 35 years of research on BI process, antecedents and outcomes published in top tier ABS ranked journals.

Building on a process framework, this review identifies major patterns and contradictions across eight dimensions, namely, environmental antecedents; organizational antecedents; managerial and individual antecedents; BI process; strategic outcomes; firm performance outcomes; decision-making; and organizational intelligence. Finally, the review pinpoints to gaps in linkages across the BI process, its antecedents and outcomes for future researchers to build upon.

This review carries some implications for practitioners and particularly the role they ought to play should they seek actionable intelligence as an outcome of the BI process. Across the studies this review examined, managerial reluctance to open their intelligence practices to close examination was omnipresent. Although their apathy is understandable, due to their frustration regarding the lack of measurability of intelligence constructs, managers manifestly share a significant amount of responsibility in turning out explorative and descriptive studies partly due to their defensive managerial participation. Interestingly, managers would rather keep an ineffective BI unit confidential than open it for assessment in fear of competition or bad publicity. Therefore, this review highlights the value open participation of managers in longitudinal studies could bring to the BI research and by extent the new open intelligence culture across their organizations where knowledge is overt, intelligence is participative, not selective and where double loop learning alongside scholars is continuous. Their commitment to open participation and longitudinal studies will help generate new research that better integrates the BI process within its context and fosters new measures for intelligence performance.

This study provides an integrative framework that integrates the interrelationships across the BI process and its organizational context and outlines the covered research areas and the underexplored ones. By so doing, the developed framework sets the ground for scholars to further develop insights within each dimension and across their interrelationships.

The purpose of this case study was to increase the knowledge base of how research librarians experience and cope with the turbulence of change within their library system. A library belonging to the Association of Research Libraries was selected for case study investigation. Seventeen librarians participated in on-site interviews, utilizing a protocol composed of a clustering technique and semi-structured interviewing. Instrumental case studies of each individual were then developed through a collective case method. The findings presented in this chapter include: the competing tensions between the physical and virtual environments, the speed of change, the search for professional meaning, and coping with the experiences of professional change. Analysis of the findings suggest: the emergence of a hypercritical state, the limiting nature of negative feedback, a complex systems framework for professional thinking, and coping in the hypercritical organization.