Abstract:

This paper focuses on the constantly growing importance of Competitive Intelligence (CI) in international business. The author critically assesses the current concept of Competitive Intelligence for workers in the United States who are organized in the international organization SCIP (Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals) and points out the considerable fragmentation of their understanding of Competitive Intelligence, both the process itself and its methodologies. He concludes that it mostly concerns only a collection of "yesterday's" data and information, at best, "today's" data or information with their subsequent, mostly routine, evaluation. The author considers this concept at the moment, especially when speaking of international business, to be insufficient. In the next part of his paper, the author proposes his own conception of Competitive Intelligence, where he considers CI as a systemic application discipline. This concept allows him to take advantage of all the benefits that the systemic approach to the discipline provides to its user (the teamwork and work plan). According to the fact that the author understands the output of Competitive Intelligence as a prediction about the future, he concludes that for the realization of this concept quality production of the added value is needed, which means quality production of intelligence. For this reason, the author places high demands on the level of performance of the so-called "intelligence analysis of information", in other words the engineering level of the work. For this reason, the author is inclined toward a new term for Competitive Intelligence, that is the term Competitive Engineering. The author comes to a conclusion that if a company wants to be successful in international business, it must keep their Competitive Intelligence at a much higher level than it is today.