Strategic Intelligence for the Future 1

3 Competitive Intelligence Schools Across the World: Foundations, Influence and Perspectives

3.1. Introduction: what is the competitive intelligence school?

Robert Guillaumot was a French pioneer, as well as international pioneer of competitive intelligence. During the early 1980s, he used to meet with emblematic figureheads of the competitive intelligence practitioners in the United States and Sweden. At this time he met the pioneers who would then become his friends: the Yugoslavian Stevan Dedijer, the Japanese Juro Nakagawa, and the Chinese Qihao Miao. In 1994, he invited the representatives of various national “competitive intelligences” (United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Australia, Japan, United States, France) to Boston in order to lay the foundations of an international alliance of business intelligence professionals. Later, he says: “with this alliance, my goal was to sketch the framework of a new discipline, to differentiate its content from that of other management methods and thus lay the foundations for an international coopetition guaranteeing fair play in defending our national interests”. The existence of this group as an “observatory” involved the exchange of information on best practices and innovations related to globalized competitive intelligence. Every school in the world aims to feed off others, always with a critical eye and awareness of the cultural specificities of each.

It is important to remember that this little-reported but ...