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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.

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.

The changing communication environment transforms social media as a source for obtaining competitive intelligence on rival firms through “social espionage.” This conceptual chapter discusses how the competitive information in the Web, along with the trend of corporate transparency, has created both opportunity and risk for firms in social media. Among the opportunities, we discuss (1) tactical marketing campaigns, (2) encouraging switching behavior, (3) identifying and targeting competitors’ weak points, and (4) learning from their success and failure. On the other hand, we discuss how engaging in social media results in a loss of total control in the dialogue between a firm and its customers and, ultimately, leaves a firm vulnerable to the same opportunistic tactics it may leverage in order to draw benefit from a competitor’s social media presence. Finally, we provide some recommendations aimed at reacting to social espionage in the form of a strategic grid.

Although critical to profitable pricing, competitive strategy is often overlooked in the pricing process. This often leads to poorly developed competitive actions with profitability suffering. This paper provides a comprehensive integrated process for the strategic management of the connection between pricing and competitive strategy. The use of the process proposed here provides active management of competitive interactions and significantly improves profitability.

This chapter examines firm strengths and weaknesses from the standpoint of intangible assets. These are compared within and across industry sectors in order to better understand who might be a potential collaborator (or competitor) in different contexts. Establishing the conceptual basis of a range of intangibles, including data, explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge, and intelligence, the chapter moves to metrics for assessing industry averages and individual firm capabilities. Finally, several sectors in healthcare are examined, specifically identifying what kinds of collaborators would best fit with a technology-driven start-up like Theranos.

This chapter introduces the concept of an intelligent organization in the context of the twenty-first-century knowledge economy. An intelligent organization is one in which individuals behave intelligently, work is grounded in intelligent methods and choices, and rich stocks of intelligence in the form of knowledge capital to support intelligence work and choices. Intelligence is defined as both a thing and attribute and behavior and way of working. The chapter also highlights examples of intelligent behaviors and or organizational pathologies. The chapter also highlights the importance of becoming aware of intelligent and unintelligent choices.