7. Competitive Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) includes knowledge, skills, techniques, and methods aimed at collection, organization, analysis, and dissemination of information for support in the process of business decision-making. On the other hand, Competitive Intelligence (CI) covers all those non-state intelligence that covers systematic collection, selection, and analysis of data from various sources, and their interpretation. In this paper, we will try to deal with occurrence and development of the first intellectual views about the Competitive Intelligence, key differences between Business Intelligence and Competitive Intelligence, the most important definitions of the CI, typologies of this sort of intelligence work recognized in scientific and professional literature, techniques and methods specific to this kind of intelligence in the context of information and communication technologies of today, and with the review of types of services related to Competitive Intelligence, with the focus on the Internet portals which provide this kind of service based on open-source data collected from publicly available sources.