Economic Intelligence: Using Innovation to Reinvent the Business

This paper is about showing how economic intelligence could be a tool for relevant innovation decision support and how its integration within the firm can strengthen its innovation capabilities, protect itself from competitors and ensure an essential competitive edge. Innovation is a difficult concept to identify. It’s a complex process that involves all of the firm’s behaviors. Innovation is a decisive choice and risk-taking. Today, it holds a prominent place in corporate strategy. Innovative firms need information about their environments that are characterized by stiffer competition, resulting in the need to keep abreast of competitors’ movements, vendor characteristics and changing technologies. These data are in perpetual evolution, it is necessary to evaluate trends and identify changes in order to be able to anticipate and remain innovative. Economic intelligence is a collection of concepts, methods and tools that unify all the coordinated actions of research, acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of information relevant to firms. This is one of the key success factors of firm projects and decision support. In addition, it offers an absorptive capacity that highlights the existence of a new need and therefore ensures the existence of a market for future innovation. It thus promotes the success of an innovation process by developing interfirm networks for the production of new resources.