The course lecturer will have argued that “strategy without intelligence isn’t strategy, its guessing”. Some managers however take the view that a competitive strategy that is rigorously developed around a strong set of product/service offerings, regardless of rivals intentions, plans, and actions, will, in any event, ‘win the day’. Your task is to defend, through evidence and argument one of these two (or alternative) views.

1. Introduction
In the 1960s and 1970s, firms across the world faced little foreign competition from each other and corporate strategy simply consisted of focusing on new product development to meet the increasing demand from expanding middle classes. In recent times, world growth has slowed, ease of trade has …show more content…

More recently in 1980,
Michael Porter published the study; Competitive-Strategy: Techniques for Analysing
Industries and Competitors and since then, this has been widely viewed as the foundation of modern competitive intelligence. This led to large scale revisiting of the central truth of
Porter’s observation that ‘Competition is at the core o f the success or failure of firms’ by many business managers in the years that followed (Bernhardt 1994).
Elements of Competitive Intelligence
Intelligence efforts must be conducted in a coord inated way to ensure the greatest benefit is derived from such as exercise. It is therefore practical to divide the field of Competitive
Intelligence into elements that correspond to the company’s specific business information needs. The benefit of this is twofold; competitive intelligence efforts can be first targeted at the most critical elements, but the work required for less critical elements is identified and can be planned for commencement at a later phase when it is required (GIA 2004).
Goshal and Kim (1986) highlighted that competitive Intelligence can be segmented into the collection and analysis of information on markets, new technologies, customers, competitors, and broad social trends. A simpler and rather typical approach is to divide
Competitive Intelligence into competitor intelligence, customer intelligence a nd market intelligence. An