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The article traces the origins of the competitive intelligence fields and identifies both the practitioner, academic and inter‐disciplinary views on CI practice. An examination of the literature relating to the field is presented, including the identification of the linear relationship which CI has with marketing and strategic planning activities.

Bibliometric assessment of the discipline. Findings reveal the representation of cross disciplinary literature which emphasises the multi‐faceted role which competitive intelligence plays in a modern organization.

The analysis supports the view of competitive intelligence being an activity consisting dominantly of environmental scanning and strategic management literature. New fields of study and activity are rapidly becoming part of the competitive intelligence framework.

The analysis only uses ABI Inform as the primary sources for literature alongside Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) and Competitive Intelligence Foundation (CIF) publications, particularly the Journal of Competitive Intelligence and Management. A more comprehensive bibliometric analysis might reveal additional insights. Simple counts were used for analytical purposes rather than co‐citation analysis.

Attention is drawn to the need for the integration of additional, complementary fields of study and competitive intelligence practice. It is clear that today's competitive intelligence practitioner cannot afford to rely on what they learned 20 years ago in order to ensure the continued competitive advantage of their firm. A keen understanding of all business functions, especially marketing and planning is advocated.

While there have been bibliographies of competitive intelligence literature there have been few attempts to relate this to the three distinct areas of practice. This article is of use to scholars in assisting them to disentangle the various aspect of competitive intelligence and also to managers who wish to gain an appreciation of the potential which competitive intelligence can bring to marking and business success.

The paper seeks to address the viability of planning and executing the integration of four often independent marketing information management techniques, i.e. competitive intelligence (CI), customer relationship management (CRM), data mining (DM) and market research (MR).

The research presented is a longitudinal, exploratory and descriptive case study, covering a three‐year period during a critical development phase of a medium‐size, national employer association which sought to improve the quality of marketing‐based insights to its strategic planning capability as well as improve economic outcomes.

It is possible to achieve profitable and capability enhancing integration of diverse marketing information management techniques. Successful integration and the use of a highly focused cross‐functional team generated better market strategies and bottom line benefits.

The need to generate greater insight from popular marketing information management and planning techniques is routinely experienced by marketing and other executive decision makers. This article provides a multi‐year roadmap of the successful execution of technique integration, including identifying barriers that arose as well as suggesting solutions for achieving progress.

There are very few case studies published that demonstrate the successful evolution and integration of CI, CRM, DM and MR into the enterprise's strategy‐making process. The unique element of this example is that it was achieved within the context of a medium‐sized, national, not‐for‐profit employer association.

Seeks to examine three empirical studies carried out in Canada, the UK and Europe with comparisons drawn on their approach and findings.

The studies were compared using a framework, developed by the authors, along four central elements and two influencing drivers.

Little measurement consistency or output value was evident. The current focus on isolated studies, carried out at a macro level, is discouraged.

Future studies need greater rigour, and consequently might be of more value to academics and practitioners.

The lack of research consistency is highlighted. Recommendations are made for stronger adhesion with other disciplines to develop a robust research agenda.

The paper seeks to explain how competitive intelligence officers can participate more fully in strategy formulation and implementation, and how they can contribute to the strategic intelligence process.

The paper presents a review of the literature and the development of a strategic marketing intelligence and multi‐organisational resilience framework.

Competitive intelligence officers can contribute more fully to the strategic intelligence process and help establish an intelligence culture that incorporates counter‐intelligence. By adopting a broader understanding of what strategic marketing represents, marketing managers can devise new approaches to managing customer relationships and can develop international/global brand positioning strategies that when implemented counter the actions of legitimate competitors and new entrants, and disrupt the actions of counterfeiters and fraudsters.

A study can be undertaken to establish how a multi‐organisational resilience value system evolves within an organisation, and how trust and credibility among competitive intelligence professionals can be developed.

Academics and practitioners can collaborate in order to establish how an intelligence culture can be created within an organisation. Furthermore, they can also collaborate in establishing how a proactive approach to risk assessment can underpin scenario analysis and planning and aid the strategic decision‐making process.

A number of insights are provided into how competitive intelligence officers contribute to the development of a multi‐organisational resilience value system that is underpinned by an intelligence culture.

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 is intended to enable competitive intelligence practitioners using an important method for everyday work when confronted with conditional uncertainties: the Bayes' theorem.

The paper shows how the mathematical concept of the Bayes theorem applies to competitive intelligence problems. The main approach is to illustrate the concepts by a near‐real world example. The paper also provides background for further reading, especially for psychological problems connected with Bayes' theorem.

The main finding is that conditional uncertainties represent a common problem in competitive intelligence. They should be computed explicitly rather than estimated intuitively. Otherwise, serious misinterpretations and complete project failures might follow.

In psychological literature it is a known fact that conditional uncertainties sometimes cannot be handled correctly. Conditional uncertainties seem to be handled well when they are about human properties. This should be verified or falsified in the competitive intelligence context.

In general, the application of Bayes' theorem should be seen as one of the foundations of competitive intelligence education. Especially, when it is clear in which intelligence research situations conditional uncertainties can or cannot be handled intuitively, competitive intelligence education and practice should be adapted to these findings.

CI practitioners can underestimate the value of Bayes' theorem in practice as they are often unaware of the (psychological) problems around handling conditional uncertainties intuitively. The article demonstrates how to take a computational approach to conditional uncertainties in CI projects. Thus, it can be used as part of appropriate CI training material.

There is a danger of allowing competitive analysis to receive less than adequate attention in the marketing‐planning process as it is subordinated to a customer‐driven focus. Clearly important though customers are, they should not dominate marketing strategy and planning to the exclusion of other influential groups, one of these being competitors. With this in mind, a pilot research project was undertaken to gain a better understanding of how UK companies conduct competitive intelligence. From this pilot, a tentative typology of companies was developed to reflect four attributes of competitive intelligence activity: attitude, gathering, use, and location. Further research was subsequently undertaken to corroborate the findings of the pilot study, test the appropriateness of the typology and further develop the classification definitions. The research has resulted in a typology that illustrates a continuum of behaviour on the four strands of investigation. From this, an understanding of CI best practice can be deduced.

The purpose of this paper is to advance and investigate empirically how entrepreneurial attitude and normative beliefs influence managerial scanning for competitive intelligence and how managerial scanning efforts subsequently impact managerial interpretation of organizations' strengths and weaknesses in the competitive arena.

A structural equation model was tested with survey data from 309 managers in the USA.

The results indicate that entrepreneurial attitude orientation and market orientation significantly impact managerial scanning for competitive intelligence, which in turn leads to managerial representations of competitive advantage.

This paper demonstrates that scanning for competitive intelligence is more an entrepreneurial activity than a routine activity for managers, and that managerial scanning efforts can be maximized in highly market‐oriented organizations that value competitive intelligence collection and dissemination. Proactive scanning for competitive intelligence enables managers to develop a fuller picture of the superiority or deficiency of their organizations. Future research needs to address the inherent cyclicity of the managerial sense‐making process.

This paper is the first effort to examine empirically the scanning cycle – that is, the relationships between managerial business motivation, intelligence scanning and sense‐making. It offers strategic guides to both academicians and practitioners on how to achieve a better understanding of the complex and dynamic market through proactive scanning activities.

The paper seeks to show how the increasingly popular use of data and information acquired from open sources (OS) impacts competitive and marketing intelligence (C/MI). It describes the current state of the art in analysis efforts of open source intelligence (OSINT) in business/commercial enterprises, examines the planning and execution challenges organizations are experiencing associated with effectively using and fusing OSINT in C/MI decision‐making processes, and provides guidelines associated with the successful use of OSINT.

This is a descriptive, conceptual paper that utilizes and develops arguments based on the search of three unclassified bodies of literature in competitive and marketing intelligence, intelligence processing and marketing analysis.

Open sources are useful in marketing analyses because they can be easily accessible, inexpensive, quickly accessed and voluminous in availability. There are several conceptual and practical challenges the analyst faces in employing them. These can be addressed through awareness of these issues as well as a willingness to invest resources into studying how to improve the data gathering/analysis interface.

Marketing analysts increasingly rely on open sources of data in developing plans, strategy and tactics. This article provides a description of the challenges they face in utilizing this data, as well as provides a discussion of the effective practices that some organizations have demonstrated in applying and fusing open sources in their C/MI analysis process.

There are very few papers published focusing on applying OSINT in enterprises for competitive and marketing intelligence purposes. More uniquely, this paper is written from the perspective of the marketing analyst and how they use open source data in the competitive and marketing sense‐making process and not the perspective of individuals specialized in gathering these data.

The paper seeks to examine the relationship between the number of competitive intelligence (CI) information topics used by small Canadian firms and their innovation performance, measured by the number of newly launched products, processes and services.

A CI information framework was applied including 42 information topics classified into four groups, i.e. industry, competitors, customers and firm. The 45 firms in the sample were classified into three types, i.e. new technology‐based, specialized supplier, and service firms. Statistical analysis was used to analyze the relationship between CI information and innovation.

Analysis of the results suggested that there was a clear relationship between the CI information firms used and their innovation performance, specialized suppliers firms were the most efficient users of CI information, information about industry and competitors was the least used but highly relevant for firms' innovation performance, and information about customers was found to be highly used and relevant for the innovation of all firms.

The methodological validation of the CI information framework could help executive managers in the development of analytical tools enhancing the role of CI for new product/process/service launch.

The results demonstrate the need for using appropriate firm classifications and in depth statistical analysis when studying the relationship between CI information and innovation.