FUNDAMENTALS OF COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE (CI) [1]

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CI — Historical Remarks

The Anglo-Saxon terms of Environmental Scanning, Competitive Intelligence, Business Intelligence, and the French terms of “Veille Stratégique” and “Intelligence Stratégique”, although not interchangeable and presenting some important differences (not only semantic), are used to designate the informational processes used by organizations to make the surveillance of their environment.

This concept evolved in the last four decades not only at the level of its objectives, but also in what respects its organization and implementation approaches as an informational process built inside a company and linked to, and giving contribution for, the decision making process (Gibbons, Prescott, 1996; Prescott, 1999; Cohen, 2000: 49).

Aguilar defined in 1967 the concept of Environmental Scanning as “(…) the activity of acquiring information (…) about events and relationships in a company’s outside environment, the knowledge of which would assist top management in its task of charting the company’s future course of action.” (Aguilar, 1967: 1)

The definition presented by Aguilar and all his work is a fundamental landmark in this area, since he made a broader approach when compared to the majority of the studies made by that time (Young, 1961; Wall, 1974; Cleland, King, 1975; Montgomery, Weinberg, 1979), strongly anchored in the marketing intelligence field (Prescott, 1999: 40), having Aguilar developed an exploratory study that was capable of connecting the conceptual approach of surveillance and scanning to an important empirical component (observation) based on interviews to managers of North American companies from the chemical industry (Aguilar, 1967; Prescott, 1999; Cohen, 2000; 2006).

Aguilar (1967) introduced the scanning as a tool to help the top management team of a company and simultaneously as an approach capable of stimulate and co-ordinate the external strategic diagnosis of an organization. The “scanning” activity is presented by Aguilar as a formal activity of research of informal data on the business environment. For Aguilar (1967), environmental scanning was a device aiming to facilitate the acquisition of information about…