Competitive Inteligence 2.0: Organization, Innovation and Territory

Chapter 7

Competitive Intelligence 2.0 Tools ¹

7.1. Introduction

For over 10 years, projects have been carried out in enterprises with the aim of capturing, storing, and sharing knowledge among employees. A range of tools has since emerged. These tools allow us to adapt to a variety of situations such as managing specific projects, codifying expertise and know-how, publishing collaboratively, supporting communities of practice, etc. Facilitating cooperation between individuals separated in time and space and implementing these solutions on enterprise servers can lead to achieving an unusual collaborative potential. The flexibility gained has nurtured the idea of a greater collective efficiency that would result in the emergence of more agile companies which can better read the movements of competitors and anticipate market changes and adapt to them in real time. Collective intelligence would emerge from this potentially permanent interconnection between employees and the knowledge base of their enterprise.

Since, as we shall see later, this expectation was not met by the first generation of tools, it seems to us that services and practices from the “2.0” wave might help companies to achieve this goal. Their characteristics and the modalities of their implementation are sufficiently innovative to the effect that we can speak of a new generation of collaborative tools. We will show that they have the potential of making collaboration in organizations be more natural and therefore, ...