Online Relevance for Competitive Intelligence. (the Dollar Sign)

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When I think about business research, I include competitive intelligence as a subset, just as I include market research and company financial investigations. My seminars on business research concentrate on finding information on companies, industries, economic conditions, management issues, and market analysis. Any of these could be related to competitive intelligence, although there are a multitude of reasons for someone to want research for these general topics. Take companies, for example. It might be a competitive question, but it could equally be an investment question or a job opportunity question.

It always shocks me that the literature on competitive intelligence ignores the tools that I hold dear. It should surprise no one that these tools are online research tools. My recent attendance at the SCIP (Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals) annual conference, held mid-March in Anaheim, California, reinforced my wonder at the dearth of interest by these researchers in online tools. Am I missing something? Is the online world irrelevant to competitive intelligence professionals? Or are they talking about these tools and I'm not hearing them properly?

For a reality check of recent research, I turned first to ABI/INFORM. It contains the largest number of articles from SCIP's official magazine, Competitive …