Resumen de Competitive intelligence: a new paradigm in the strategic direction of organisations in a globalised world
The author starts from the challenges that organizations cope with in the global world of the twenty-first century with a dynamic of changes in their markets, technologies and socio-economic context. Those changes often behave disruptive character of the prevailing by both its content and its complexity and uncertainty derived in part from the speed with which they occur. This dynamic requires a new paradigm to be taken into consideration. First in terms of culture and learning processes of the organization in relation to the changes taking place around them but as well in the way decisions are built and made. That is how the organization and its sphere of influence detects, anticipates and �reads� the meaning and stakes of those changes. But also how it integrates and transforms the results of that learning capability into actions, decisions.
This integration need is stressed in the decisions field, affecting the management and strategic direction of the business. This new paradigm that requires intelligence to compete is collected by the proposal formulated as competitive intelligence and other denominations also known. Competitive intelligence is not as such a �new� proposal, it takes more than half a century of practice in many companies and organizations as we understand it today1, and has precedents from many centuries ago. But it is still unknown and partially or completely unexploited by a large number of them. So it can be said that not exploiting today the potential posed by CI in organizations is a competitive disadvantage. The article reviews the term, its foundations and the processes involved. The main benefits and some application examples are put forward and the relationship between competitive intelligence, CI, business security and the importance of the influence concept are reviewed. Focused on the business world, this pa-per also addresses other applications of the same concept, as in the case of territorial intelligence. Finally some evolutionary trends in this field are provided.
