Defining Competitive Technical Intelligence

This is a continuation of my SCIP09 Conference learning. This book fills a void as a current, comprehensive competitive technical intelligence (CTI) resource. Competitive Technical Intelligence focuses on science and technology (S&T) and provides methods and tools to help companies, labs and governments maintain a technical competitive edge.

The Book: Competitive Technical Intelligence

The book is divided into 5 areas: CTI Today; CTI Organizations and Operations; CTI Tools and Methods; CTI Company and Industry Case Studies and Outlook for CTI. There are 20 chapters each written by a CTI expert.

The book begins with a definition of competitive technical intelligence. Simply put, CTI is technical analysis within the competitive intelligence discipline.

CTI seeks to identify a competitor’s R&D strategy and innovation pipeline to identify the next generation of threats in the marketplace. It typically includes the analysis of patents, scientific publications, news sources, open innovation needs, and other technological, engineering, or scientific sources. CTI focuses on identifying technological trends, opportunities and threats, and their relationship to competitors’ business strategies.

CTI often provides the longest future look at your competition versus other forms of competitive intelligence such as sales, product and financial.

CTI’s Chief Attributes

• Analysis of science and technical aspects of the external environment
• Current, timely, accurate and defensible
• Analyzed information that has been processed, validated and interpreted
• Actionable, containing recommendations that imply what needs to be done
• Gathered using ethical and legal means

Competitive Technical Intelligence is NOT

• National security intelligence or espionage
• Industrial espionage Market research or marketing
• An isolated information gathering effort

In 1997, Brad Ashton and Dick Klavans, authors of Keeping Abreast of Science and Technology, observed that CTI was a young area of business. It has since evolved, and practitioners indicate that CTI products have had a significant impact on company and S&T decisions.  Read more about competitive technical intelligence and order your copy through SCIP here.

How have you used competitive technical intelligence at your company? Do you see CTI as a growing practice or do you feel its vulnerability in these troubled times?