On the relationship between competitive intelligence and innovation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37380/jisib.v10i2.583Keywords:
Competitive intelligence, competitive intelligence practices, environmental change, innovationAbstract
Innovation research suggests customer, competitor and market knowledge are important requirements for innovation. Researchers in competitive intelligence (CI) have proposed that there should be a relationship between CI and innovation. Yet despite both fields recognising the need for CI and related areas for innovation in their theories, there have not been many empirical studies that look at CI and innovation and those few studies that do exist have limited focus and have only looked at a small subset of CI variables (for example collection sources). The aim of this study is to examine if there is a relationship between CI and innovation. This was done by surveying Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professional (SCIP) members and those attending SCIP events, and asking them about their intelligence practices and how innovative their company was. Ninety-five questions were asked about CI structure and organization, intelligence focus, information sources used, analytical techniques used, communication methods, and the management of the intelligence efforts. Of the 95 competitive intelligence measures used in this study, 56 (59%) were significantly correlated with the study’s measure of innovation. The measures within the CI organizational elements and CI management categories had the highest percentage of measures significantly correlated with innovation (90% and 89%). Four of the CI measures had statistically significant correlations above .300. These included the extent to which business decisions in the organization were better facilitated/supported as a result of intelligence efforts (.355), the number of performance measures used in assessing CI’s performance (.322) and decision depth (.313), which is a measure of the number of decisions that utilized CI. As a study of this nature measuring the relationship between CI and innovation has not been conducted previously, the findings can be beneficial to organisations using innovation to succeed in the competitive environment.
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