Current Status and Academic Trend of the Development of Domestic and Overseas Competitive Intelligence

摘要

This article explains the concept and characteristics of competitive intelligence, analyzes the current status of the development of domestic and overseas competitive intelligence, and argues that the future development of competitive intelligence will spread from the enterprises to regions, industries, countries and even regional economic associations. With the application of all kinds of new information technologies, business software in terms of competitive intelligence comes forth and IT technology will be the main method for collecting competitive intelligence. Based on a brief review of the academic resources of competitive intelligence, this article proposes three possible breakthroughs in the theoretical research of competitive intelligence. Firstly, the participants in the self-organization process have the basic characteristics described in the self-organization theory when collecting and utilizing competitive intelligence. The self-organization method can be used to describe the process of collecting competitive intelligence as well as the causes and objects of competitive intelligence, which may guide individual work in collecting competitive intelligence. Second, competitive intelligence has the same social background and similar way of thinking as public administration science, which was established in the same period with competitive intelligence. Third, in the Internet age, with the prevailing of mesh governance theory of public value management (PVM), competitive intelligence theory will have the mark of web/search.Competitive Intelligence is not only a theoretical concept, but also practical and objective, including economic intelligence, technical intelligence, business intelligence and market intelligence. Activities in various areas may be included in the scope of competitive intelligence. From the process of the development of competitive intelligence, we can see that it is an organizational, principled and effective operational method developed under the comparatively perfecting market economy system of western developed countries. It treats objective practice as its aim, instead of pure theory itself.