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History of Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence as a strategic discipline goes back to Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy (1980), but its formal adoption by corporations came slightly later. Leonard Fuld's 1985 book on competitor intelligence is usually cited as the point when the field acquired its own identity. Ben and Tamar Gilad published the first organizational model for a formal corporate CI function in 1988, which a number of US firms then adopted.

The first formal competitive intelligence team may have been set up at Motorola. Robert Galvin, then CEO, recruited Jan Herring (a former CIA officer) in the mid-1980s to build a dedicated corporate intelligence capability modelled loosely on government intelligence-cycle thinking. That template of data collection, analysis and dissemination became a reference that others copied. The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) was founded in 1986, which gave the discipline a professional body and accelerated adoption across large US corporates. Since then, other companies such as Intel have discussed their CI functions at SCIP events.

Procter & Gamble was another early adopter. Its CI function evolved from routine competitor reports into something embedded in strategy development. Chairman John Pepper described this evolution in a keynote to SCIP's CEO Roundtable in April 1999, framing CI as integral to the company's restructuring at the time. P&G gradually evolved from a centralized arrangement to a "hub and spoke" structure of a central team feeding and coordinating distributed analysts close to the business units. Unfortunately, P&G's CI is also documented for the wrong reasons. In 2001 the company was caught running an aggressive intelligence operation against Unilever's hair-care business, including contractors going through bins ("dumpster diving") outside Unilever's Chicago offices. P&G self-disclosed once senior management learned of it, returned documents and settled with Unilever. It became a standard teaching case on the legal and ethical boundary between CI and corporate espionage.

The Procter & Gamble incident is rare but not unique, and similar negative events are often one reason why it becomes known that a large company has a CI team, for example HP, Oracle, IBM

These days, many large corporations have formal competitive intelligence units, particularly in the industries that tend to conduct competitive intelligence most often, such as pharmaceutical, technology and defense. Even where a competitive intelligence function may not conduct primary research, it will be monitoring competitors formally in one way or another, so it is likely that every Fortune 500 company has some level of competitive intelligence program.

For example, in the technology industry, large companies with known competitive programs include:

  • Adobe

  • AT&T

  • Atlassian

  • AWS

  • Cisco

  • Dell

  • Google

  • HPE

  • IBM

  • Microsoft

  • Salesforce

  • SAP

  • SAS Institute

  • ServiceNow

  • Snowflake

  • Teradata

  • VMWare

  • Workday

  • Zoom