INFORMATION PROCESSING THEORY AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING

Although we can identify different Environmental Scanning and Competitive Intelligence processes, the majority of those approaches are based on different information theory perspectives and paradigms (Day, Schoemaker, 2006), ranging from the information –process view of organizational decision making initiated by the work of Alan Newell and Herbert Simon (1972) and further anchored in the work of Cyert and March (1963), and later by March and Olsen (1975), and the cybernetic view of organizations as a way to explain the multiple variety of organizational design forms observed in different markets and different time frames .

Humbert Lesca and Sylvie Blanco argue that the information that is required to anticipate unpredictable changes can be assimilated to Weak Signals. Several authors (Ansoff, 1975, Feldman, March, 1981, Lesca, Blanco, 1998, Hiltunen, 2001, 2007) show that dealing with this kind of information is difficult because of its nature: it is anticipative, qualitative, ambiguous, and fragmentary, of various formats and it may come from very diverse sources. (Lesca, Blanco, 1998: 3)

According to Lesca and Blanco (1998) the interpretations of that kind of ambiguous information can be integrated in different perspectives and processes. Those can include a strategic decision process which tends to be ill-structured…