Remember when Larry Ellison went digging through Bill Gates's garbage? Well, actually, it was a tad more complicated: In 2000 detectives hired by Oracle rummaged through the trash of a pro-Microsoft organization. And there was a similar brouhaha a year later, when Procter & Gamble admitted that employees had hired investigators to rifle through Unilever's rubbish for shampoo secrets. These kinds of activities may reflect the common image of corporate intelligence-gathering. But true "competitive intelligence" (or CI, as if s often called), at least as practiced in most corporations, is hardly so cloak-and-dagger. Typically the purview of the strategy department, CI is a legal and essential corporate function that involves collecting and analyzing often public but little-noticed information about rivals.
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