Competitive intelligence in Spain

Abstract

This study presents the main results of a survey of a sample of Spanish firms which include competitive intelligence and/or technology watch (TW) services in their organigrams or which are consumers of such intelligence products. The objectives were to acquire information on (i) the model (whether centralized or decentralized) of their intelligence services and personnel and their consumption of external intelligence consulting services and TW platforms; (ii) the methods they use to determine what information they need; (iii) the means they use to obtain that information; (iv) areas in which they seek information (competitors, consumers, economic situation, etc.); (v) their methods of analysis; (vi) the products generated by that analysis; and (vii) how they promote intelligence tasks internally. The results and the main conclusions are provided in the corresponding sections.

Keywords

Competitive intelligence firms Spain

Introduction

Entrepreneurs and managers have an inescapable need to understand the external environment in which their firms operate. They need to know about who their competitors, suppliers, distributors, and customers are and what they do, the financial entities they work with, and the operations of the government agencies that affect them. They also need data on the economic, political, and social situation of the territories in which their business is carried out and on scientific and technical advances that might affect them and their applications. These needs call for a structured process of information acquiral suited to the particularities of each firm, for the interpretation and analysis of that information, and for making the resulting analyses available to the firm’s decision makers. Often, these operations are carried out informally due to a lack of specialized personnel or insufficient budget (Nenzhelele and Pellissier, 2014). But firms need to be able to structure this intelligence cycle because its application will help improve their competitive position and market share (Stefanikova et al., 2015).

This discipline has come to be known as competitive intelligence (CI). The year 1986 was important in this sense as marking the creation of the Society of CI Professionals in the US. It was preceded, however, by studies of the importance of information in business management, and, indeed, intelligence practices have really been a part of business for centuries. There was a major growth in the literature on the acquiral and protection of information during the 20th century. In the first third of that century, there was particular interest in the need to protect information from competitors (Childs, 1930). Later work, such as that of Aguilar’s (1967) Scanning the Business Environment or Porter’s (1980) Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analysing Industries and Competitors, accelerated business awareness of the need to understand their competitive environment in detail.

The present work is part of the continuity of analyses of CI in Spanish firms which began in the 1990s. Some of those studies looked at the consumption and origin of the information firms were using (Giménez Toledo and Román Román, 2004; Vázquez Valero and Velayos Huerta, 1999). Others considered specific sectors in particular such as that of exports (Postigo, 2001), metal (Pérez-González and Placer-Maruri, 2011), and pharmaceuticals (Fernández-Arias et al., 2016); groups of firms in different sectors (Tena and Comai, 2004); and firms in specific regions such as Extremadura (Muñoz-Cañavate and Pulgarín Guerrero, 2009), Basque Country (Cantonnet et al., 2015), and Cantabria (Placer-Maruri et al., 2016). Spanish firms have also been part of international studies such as that carried out between 2001 and 2002 for four European regions (Madrid, Lorraine, Tuscany, and West Midlands) by the Cooperation to Promote Economic and Technological Intelligence in SMEs consortium (CETISME, 2002), and those of the Global Intelligence Alliance to determine the uses of intelligence in firms of different countries (Global Intelligence Alliance, 2007). Spain’s Chambers of Commerce (Muñoz-Cañavate and Hípola, 2008) and regional business assistance agencies such as those responsible for promoting internationalization (Muñoz-Cañavate and Hípola, 2015) have also been studied from the perspective of their being producers of information as raw material for the intelligence cycle. In the following sections, we shall present the results of a survey of a sample of Spanish firms which perform intelligence tasks or are consumers of intelligence products.

Methods

The firms surveyed

We decided to use a questionnaire to obtain data on the situation of Spanish firms regarding their CI practices. The sample was selected non-probabilistically as being firms with known CI practices. In particular, a search was carried out at events (congresses, conferences, courses) where Spanish firms had presented clear practices of the use of CI in their management processes. Assistance was also requested from Spanish consultants in CI who facilitated our making contact with their clients – firms with CI units or that are consumers of intelligence products.

For the selection of the sample, all the firms had to have intelligence tasks as part of their core functioning and fulfill one of three recognized conditions: (i) have a specific CI unit, (ii) use CI in more than one of their departments, or (iii) subcontract CI to external consultant firms. The initial objective was to choose firms with more than €100 million in assets and with a certain organizational structure, although finally firms with financial assets of less than €100 million were included to obtain a sample of the entire business spectrum, while still avoiding the presence of small businesses.

A group was collected of 47 firms, from different sectors, that conformed to the requirements. A database was created with the contact information including the identification of the department or the person responsible for the area of intelligence.

Parallel with the preparation of the final directory of firms to survey, a pretest was conducted with various firms of the directory to get their opinion on the questionnaire. It was observed that one of the blocks of questions generated a certain level of rejection on the part of the potential respondents, since they considered that some of those questions were intrusive into specific core aspects of their management. In particular, the final part of the questionnaire included a block of questions that sought to determine both to which departments the product of the analysis was sent to (Board of Directors, Financial Management, etc.) and how these products were distributed (e-mail, fax, etc.). These questions, which had generated rejection in the pretest phase, were eliminated from the final version. The decision was taken to leave only those questions whose contents were not uncomfortable for the firms and which they could answer without worrying about the information that they were providing. Despite this, several of the firms in the final directory of the sample considered that, although they had initially agreed to participate in the study, the data were confidential and that they could not respond to the questionnaire.

Fieldwork was carried out in the second and third quarters of 2016. An e-mail was sent to the respondents with a cover letter and the link to the questionnaire. Twenty firms responded: 18 were totally private and 2 were public. The sizes of the 20 firms in terms of their total assets in 2015 are reflected in Table 1 and in terms of the number of employees in Table 2.

Table 1.

Total assets of the firms surveyed.

Total assets	Number of firms
From €1 million to €100 million	4
From €101 to €1000 million	8
From €1001 million to €5000 million	3
More than €5000 million	5

Source: SABI (Bureau van Dijk).

Table 2.

Number of employees in the firms surveyed.

Number of employees	Number of firms
From 1 to 100 employees	4
From 101 to 500 employees	5
From 500 to 1000 employees	2
From 1001 to 5000 employees	6
More than 5001 employees	3

Source: SABI (Bureau van Dijk).

The largest firm of those which responded to the questionnaire was a financial entity with more than €300,000 million in assets and more than 20,000 employees.

The distribution of the firms by activity was as follows: energy production: 3; research and support for research and innovation: 3; telecommunications: 2; food: 2; heavy machinery manufacturing: 2; financial entities: 1; insurance: 1; chemicals: 1; pharmaceuticals: 1; water supply: 1; engineering: 1; construction products: 1; and large retailers: 1.

Questionnaire

The drafting of the questionnaire was based on the structure of the intelligence cycle itself which we wanted to see reflected in the survey and on the experience of previous studies in Spain about the uses of CI. Throughout the questionnaire, in the questions themselves an attempt was made to make it clear what is understood by intelligence for the purposes of this survey, accepting that the term CI may be understood in different ways by the different firms. Several studies carried out worldwide have shown that, despite the passage of years, there is still a lack of terminological stability regarding the concept of CI. Bergeron and Hiller (2002) noted that there is no agreement as to what is meant by competitive or business intelligence. Managers sometimes fail to learn the true meaning of ‘competitive intelligence’ and do not link this discipline to strategic planning (Köseoglu et al., 2016), as was confirmed in research by Lucas et al. (2016) for the Brazilian scientific production. Reality has shown that the term itself is not well known by firms in general (García-Alsina et al., 2016; Postigo, 2001). In the case of Spain, among other aspects, this is because of the absence until only a few years ago of the denomination of intelligence as a discipline in the scientific and professional corpus. It is also because systematic processes of acquiral and analysis of information based on previous needs have not formed part of Spanish firms’ management practices, although there have at times been informal, relatively unstructured, efforts in this direction, especially in some sectors such as pharmaceuticals. Thus, in drafting the questions, we used language that was clear and straightforward for the respondents to interpret, in which the intelligence cycle was set out explicitly.

The questionnaire was designed through Google Drive’s Form tool to facilitate the collection and processing of the data. The final questionnaire comprised 25 items, of which 80 percent were closed questions and 20 percent open (Table 3).

Table 3.

Proportion of questions in the questionnaire.

Type of question		Subtotals	Totals	Proportion (%)
Closed	Dichotomous	11	20	80
	Multiple choice	2
	Rating (Likert-type) scale	4
	Neutral (filler)	3
Open		5	5	20
Total		25	25	100

The responses to the questionnaire were entered into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The results will be reflected tables and charts presenting the frequency of the responses and the corresponding percentage data. The questionnaire was organized into the following seven blocks:

Block 1. General aspects: Structure, personnel, CI software, and external consultants

With the questions of block 1, we sought to know what type of intelligence model the firms were using, that is, whether it was centralized in a single department (and, if so, the name of that department), distributed throughout the organization in different departments, or corresponded to a mixed system that combined these two models. In addition, the respondents’ opinions were sought on whether intelligence would in the future become part of each department’s functions so that intelligence tasks would be carried out in the place where they are needed and on whether CI budgets were likely to be increased or decreased. They also inquired about the type of personnel that performs the intelligence tasks, whether software platforms for CI were used in order to simplify the CI process and convert the information extracted into large data sets (Aina et al., 2016) and finally the use of outside consulting services to perform the tasks of data acquiral and analysis. There is increasing use of such consulting subcontractors in the world, as confirmed by Nenzhelele and Pellissier (2014) in their research on South African firms.

Block 2. Definition of the needs for information

Block 2 questions were related to the methods or tools the firms use to determine their information needs prior to actually acquiring and analyzing that information. The methods referred to in the questions were questionnaires, interviews, observation, critical success factors (CSFs), and key intelligence topics (KITs) (Herring, 1999; Vuori, 2006).

Block 3. The means used to obtain information

Block 3 sought to know the extent to which personal or technological means are used to obtain information.

Block 4. Types of information used versus the requirements of the external environment

Block 4, denominated types of information, links the sources that the firms potentially may need with the external environment they have to monitor. The classic literature on business management is very clear about the environment that a firm has to monitor. After all, firms are subject to forces that are internal and external to the organization which influence how their business management functions. The external forces are all those factors in the surrounding environment that may directly or indirectly affect the firm perceptibly (Ivancevich et al., 1996). This external environment is in turn divided into one that is closer to the firm’s core management (immediate environment) and which includes consumers, competitors, suppliers, distributors, financial entities, and public administrations, and another that is more remote, defined by the political and legal situation of a territory, society, economic situation, or the technological environment. Sometimes the natural environment is also part of this external context, as is the case of information about the climate. All this information is a necessary part of intelligence analysis. Thus, in this block of questions, different types of information and documents are linked to the external environment to facilitate the responses (these links can be seen in Tables 1A and 1B of Appendix 1). Block 4 concludes with another section that seeks to determine the importance of different internal sources of the firm for its intelligence analysis (Table 1C of Appendix 1).

Blocks 5, 6, and 7. Analysis, products of the analysis, and promotion of the CI unit

Finally, the last blocks of the questionnaire were oriented to the analytical techniques the firms used (block 5), the products obtained from the analysis (block 6) following the relationships based on the Spanish norm on CI and Technology Surveillance UNE 166006:2011 (Aenor, 2011), and the means used to promote the intelligence unit within the firm that it services (block 7).

Results

Presented below are the results obtained from the responses of the 20 firms that completed the questionnaire out of the 47 that were initially surveyed (a response rate of 43 percent). The data are presented with the same structure as the survey, that is, divided into seven sections.

CI unit

The firms’ intelligence model

In the questionnaire, we opted to include two initial questions aimed at knowing the structural model of the firms’ CI system, namely, the treatment of intelligence tasks in a specific department.

The results of the first survey question ‘(A) My firm has a specific Intelligence department (obtaining and analysing information) that serves the entire organization for operations of decision-making, innovation, strategy, anticipation of changes in the environment’ are very clarifying: more than half (65 percent) claim to have a specific department dedicated to information collection and analysis in order to assist in their organization’s decision-making. This question contained another open item requesting the name of the department. Some of the firms surveyed specified that these tasks were performed in departments such as marketing, R&D, research and patents, management systems, finance, strategy and programs area, or business intelligence. As can be seen in Table 4, question B, in nine firms (45 percent), each department performs intelligence activities (collection and analysis), meaning that the intelligence tasks are spread throughout the organization.

Table 4.

CI model in the firms surveyed.

	Yes	No	NR
(n = 20)	f_i (%)	f_i (%)	f_i (%)
A) My firm has a specific Intelligence department (obtaining and analyzing information) that serves the entire organization for operations of decision-making, innovation, strategy, and anticipation of changes in the environment	13 (65)	7 (35)	–
B) Intelligence tasks are distributed throughout the organization as each department of the company performs intelligence activities (obtaining and analyzing information)	9 (45)	11 (55)	–

CI: competitive intelligence; NR: do not know/no response.

In order to determine the structure of the firms’ CI model, a decision tree was designed on the basis of a cross-analysis of questions A and B. According to the result, more than 45 percent of the firms with intelligence activities have opted for a centralized model versus a mixed (20 percent) or a decentralized (25 percent) model.

Regarding whether the respondents considered that in the future each of their firm’s departments would tend to perform intelligence tasks, there was a balance between the affirmative and negative responses, as indicated in Table 5 below.

Table 5.

Distribution of firms that believe each department will tend to perform CI tasks.

(n = 20)	f_i (%)
Yes	9 (45)
No	10 (50)
NR	1 (5)

CI: competitive intelligence; NR: do not know/no response.

Staff

This first block of the questionnaire included a group of questions about the personnel dedicated to CI tasks. Of the 20 firms surveyed, 15 responded to this question. With respect to the number of people employed by the firms in intelligence tasks, some only have one person, whereas others have up to 15. The average was 5.47 people per firm.

Regarding the academic level of the employees responsible for these tasks, 100 percent have a university degree (bachelor’s or engineer). Although half of the firms did not give the explicit name of their employees’ university degrees, among those that did so there were industrial engineers, agronomists, computer scientists, science graduates (chemistry, physics, biology), and business administration, although it is also worth noting that in several firms, there are personnel with degrees in librarianship and information science (LIS), a speciality with an increasing presence for these tasks in Spain. The relationship of these LIS professionals with the world of CI has not been free of tensions. Thus, in an investigation carried out with several Swedish firms, it stood out that, while LIS professionals might participate in the entire CI cycle from information collection to its analysis, intelligence managers thought that they lacked those competencies (Håkansson and Nelke, 2015).

The opinions of the respondents about the future of intelligence in firms (the increase or decrease in numbers of personnel and in the budget dedicated to intelligence tasks) are presented in Table 6.

Table 6.

Opinions on the future of CI staff and budgets.

(n = 20)	Yes	No	NR
(n = 20)	f_i (%)	f_i (%)	f_i (%)
I) Do you think that in the future in your organization overall there will be a trend to increase the number of personnel dedicated to Intelligence tasks?	13 (65)	–	7 (35)
J) Do you think that in the future in your organization overall there will be a trend to increase the budget dedicated to intelligence tasks?	16 (80)	–	4 (20)

CI: competitive intelligence; NR: do not know/no response.

Most firms (65 percent) believe that the number of staff dedicated to intelligence tasks will tend to increase in the future, while 35 percent said that they do not know. Regarding the increase or decrease of the budget dedicated to intelligence tasks, 80 percent of the firms surveyed said they believe that the budget devoted to these tasks will increase, while 20 percent said they do not know or did not answer.

Information technology platforms concerning CI and technology watch

Less than half of the firms surveyed (35 percent) have Web platforms dealing with CI and technology watch (TW) to facilitate the tasks of obtaining and analyzing information. Of the only seven that do, 71.4 percent state that their platform is acquired by license, while 28.6 percent affirm that the platform is run by the organization itself (Table 7).

Table 7.

Percentage of firms with a Web platform.

(n = 7)	f_i (%)
Acquired by license	5 (71.4)
Developed by the organization	2 (28.6)

Of the firms that do not have such tools, 69.2 percent did not know whether their organizations would acquire any Web platform in the future (Table 8).

Table 8.

Firms without a Web platform.^a

(n = 13)	f_i (%)
Yes	1 (7.7)
No	3 (23.1)
NR	9 (69.2)

NR: do not know/no response.

^aDo you think that in the future your organization will acquire one?

External consultants

Finally, the last question of this first block regarded the use of external consultants to carry out ad hoc research projects. Twelve firms (60 percent) responded ‘Yes’ that they used external consultants while eight (40 percent) responded ‘No’. Of the 12 firms that do use external consultants, 9 have a specific department for intelligence, while 3 others do not.

Definition of information needs

As described in the Introduction, the first stage of the intelligence cycle is the identification of the information needs within the organization. To determine these needs, different methods or tools are used. Figure 1 shows the results based on the options given in the online survey to define the tools used by the firms to meet their information needs: questionnaires, interviews, observation, CSFs, and KITs. The methods most used were observation (90 percent), interviews (75 percent), and questionnaires (55 percent), followed by CSFs (25 percent) and KITs (25 percent). Some firms (15 percent) indicated that they also use other methods to identify their needs including ‘focus groups’, point-of-sale interviews, and their own digital media such as a virtual community.

Figure 1.

Use of methods to determine information needs.

Means of obtaining information

The second stage of the intelligence cycle consists of searching for information from the selected information sources. To obtain the information, use is made of such means as personal networks or computer-based networks (information technologies). In the questionnaire, we therefore used a Likert-type scale (from 1 to 5) in the question on the level of use of these sources, scoring from 1 = No use to 5 = Very much used.

Figure 2 presents the results on the use of personal networks and/or computer-based networks. If one adds together the figures of options ‘4’ and ‘5’, which reflect a high level of use of these means, then the following data are obtained: personal networks 70 percent and computer-based networks 80 percent. One thus sees that these two means for obtaining information have a high level of use.

Figure 2.

Use of personal and/or computer-based networks to obtain information.

Environments about which information is obtained

CI entails the analysis of the organization from a perspective that is both external and internal. To do this, the sources of information that are of interest must be monitored to manage each department’s needs and to help in decision-making.

As explained in the Methods section, the external environment comprises the immediate environment characterized by its proximity to the firm (consumers, competitors, suppliers, distributors, financial institutions, and public administrations) and the remote environment from which comes information that corresponds to the political, legal, technological, economic, and social and demographic spheres, whose changes also affect the firm’s management. Tables 1A and 1B in Appendix 1 present the results of the responses in which the firms value the importance of obtaining information in these areas. A Likert-type scale of 1–5 was used (1 = No importance, 2 = Little importance, 3 = Some importance, 4 = Much importance, and 5 = Essential). The Likert-type scale of 6 was assigned as 6 = Do not know/no response. For the immediate external environment (Table 1A in Appendix 1), adding together options 4 = Much importance and 5 = Essential, we find that the information most used and demanded by the firms surveyed is that which is related to their competitors (70 percent), followed by consumers (55 percent), suppliers (40 percent), distributors (35 percent), government (30 percent), and financial institutions (20 percent). For the remote external environment (Table 1B in Appendix 1), also combining options 4 = Much importance and 5 = Essential, we find that the information most demanded is related to the political and legal situation (65 percent), followed by the economic situation (40 percent) and social, demographic, and technological information (35 percent).

In addition to external information, it is also essential for the analysis to obtain internal information from the organization (see Table 1C in Appendix 1). Summing the ‘much importance’ and ‘essential’ options that reflect a more regular use, we find the following results: e-mails 70 percent, human sources 65 percent, spreadsheets 60 percent, internal data (sales) 55 percent, internal reports 55 percent, internal data (marketing) 55 percent, internal data (purchases) 50 percent, internal data (financial) 35 percent, memoranda 35 percent, internal data (costs) 30 percent, internal data (production) 30 percent, and internal data (Research & Development (R&D)) 25 percent. Thus, e-mails and human sources are the most used internal sources. In the case of e-mails, the most important source in the internal environment context, 40 percent of those surveyed regard e-mail information to be essential, and 30 percent consider it to be of much importance.

Analysis

In Figure 3, the techniques used by firms to analyze information are ordered from most used to least used. Benchmarking (90 percent), SWOT (65 percent), product comparison (60 percent), and financial analysis (60 percent) are the most used, and reverse engineering the least used (5 percent). None of the firms surveyed use political, economic, social, and technological (PEST) analyses or war games.

Figure 3.

Analysis techniques used.

Products obtained

After processing, analyzing, and interpreting information on the current and future environment in which it operates, the organization generates intelligence products in the form of oral, written, or graphic presentations and periodic reports to be disseminated to its internal users of intelligence. In Figure 4, these products are ordered from the most to the least frequently reported. There stand out situation analyses (75 percent), informational alerts (70 percent), competitor profiles (70 percent), and strategic reports for senior management (65 percent). The least frequent type corresponds to literature bulletins (10 percent).

Figure 4.

Products obtained after the analyses.

Visibility: Internal promotion of the intelligence unit

Finally, the last block of the questionnaire asked how CI/TW tasks are promoted within the firm. As seen in Figure 5, the most commonly used forms of promotion are ‘Emails to those potentially interested’ (95 percent) and ‘Meetings with directors’ (80 percent), while the least used are ‘Publishing success stories’, ‘Announcements on the intranet’, and ‘Workshops on presentation of services’.

Figure 5.

Forms of promoting the work of CI/TS. CI: competitive intelligence; TS: technological surveillance.

Conclusions

Perhaps the first conclusion to be drawn from the present work is that it is difficult to perform field studies that request information about CI practices because of the natural distrust about providing such information.

Second, we found that even though intelligence tasks conform a well-established practice in the firms that we surveyed, they are not generally carried out by departments with that name, but instead are spread over such departments as marketing, R&D+i, research, and strategy.

Questions about how the tasks of intelligence might evolve in the future showed divided opinions about the model of CI. Almost half of the firms are of the opinion that in the future each of a firm’s departments will carry out its own intelligence activities, whereas the other half considers that there will continue to predominate a centralized model. In any case, most tend to think that there will be an increase in both staffing and budget for intelligence in the future. It was particularly noteworthy that more than half of the firms are consumers of studies prepared by the growing market of intelligence consultancies in Spain.

Regarding the definition of information needs, there stood out the methods of observation, interviews, and questionnaires, and that both human and technological sources were used as means for obtaining information.

The firms acquired their information both externally and internally. With respect to the external information, we differentiated between the needs that may come from the immediate external environment (consumers, competitors, suppliers, distributors, financial institutions, and government) and those from the remote environment (political and legal situation, society, economy, and technology). For the immediate external environment, combining options 4 and 5 on the Likert-type scale, the most important types of information were those on consumers (55 percent) and competitors (60 percent). For the remote external environment, the most important was information on the political and legislative situation of a territory (65 percent). This may be explained by the size and the exporting and international character of these firms. The most frequently used sources of internal information and data were e-mails (70 percent), human sources (65 percent), and spreadsheets (60 percent).

Benchmarking was the most commonly used process of analysis (90 percent), followed by SWOT techniques (65 percent), product comparison (60 percent), and financial analysis (60 percent), and competitor profiles and patent analyses (both at 45 percent). All of these led to a series of products, mainly situation analyses (in the form of syntheses of strategic aspects), informational alerts, competitor profiles, and strategic reports for senior management.

Finally, with respect to the systems the firms use to give visibility to and promote their intelligence units, 95 percent use direct e-mails to those who are potentially interested and meetings with directors, but less importance is given to those forms of promotion that might involve the whole organization. This means that the intelligence unit is focused more on management and the more clearly interested users of their products. The rest of the company is essentially being left out of the process and has little idea of how important CI is.

Footnotes

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance provided by Mario Esteban Martínez and Eliana Benjumeda of the Infoline Consulting company who contacted most of the participating firms to carry out this study, which is the result of the collaboration agreement signed between the University of Extremadura and Infoline Consulting for the study of competitive intelligence in Spanish firms.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The study was made possible by funding from the Regional R&D+i Plan of the Government of Extremadura (Spain).

Appendix 1

In the results presented below, a 1 to 5 Likert-type scale was applied with the following options: 1 = No importance, 2 = Little importance, 3 = Some importance, 4 = Much importance, 5 = Essential, and 6 = Do not know/no response.

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