Designing Analytical Approaches for Interactive Competitive Intelligence

Since Porter’s work on competitive strategies in the 1980s, the concept of competitive intelligence has become part of the management mainstream. Currently, two big shifts are challenging the state of the art. On the one hand there is the rise of the ubiquitous servicification in all industries which makes the existing methods for product-oriented industries outdated. On the other hand there is the rise of big data (volume, velocity, variety). Both shifts are driving the development towards interactive competitive intelligence systems. The authors introduced a framework for interactive competitive intelligence systems which overcome the sequential water-fall processes which are current CI practice. In the introduced framework they combine the concept of Key Intelligence Topics (KIT) with the concept of (boundary) objects from interaction theory. The authors demonstrated with examples within their “IP Industry Base” how interactive CI for service-oriented sectors can be implemented. The resulting vector-based representations of the companies’ service profiles allow the user to visualize, compare, retrieve and analyse companies in a constructive and scalable way.