Building an Effective Competitive Intelligence System for XXX Corporation

This diploma thesis results from the need for Competitive Intelligence as a system for gathering, analyzing and communicating information about competitors to obtain a competitive advantage. The work attempts to analyze current knowledge gathering processes as well as an application of that information for strategic decision making inside the XXX corporation. After definition of basic terms several different methods and approaches to Competitive Intelligence are described. These methods are reviewed and those that suit XXX requirements best are picked up afterwards. In this thesis there are also identified some of the crucial information sources, to begin with public and commercial databases and catalogues, business publications, online sources, personal knowledge, but also data-mining and other sophisticated methods. The main contribution of this work is the proposal of Competitive Intelligence system itself, empathising an effective functionality that solves identified issues, and is based on our theoretical resources and on actual competence of the company