
Trade secrets on a USB drive, hidden in a brown envelope, exchanged at a park bench; someone stealing an employee badge to get into a facility and take pictures; paying off a disgruntled employee for information on their employer…these might be the images in your head when you think of corporate espionage…and you’d be right.
I want to make it very clear that corporate espionage is illegal, wrong, and unethical.
Corporate espionage (also known as economic espionage) can consist of the aforementioned activities, and also things like hiring a new employee from a competitor and then obtaining sensitive material from them, rummaging through your competitor’s trash, or hacking into their network. Think of how you feel about a company when the news comes out that they operate like this. Not warm and fuzzy, is it? They want to win the game, but it doesn’t count if you cheat.
That being said, knowing what your competitors are doing (or are going to do) is extremely valuable to your company. So how can you go about this while holding onto your ethics?
Enter Competitive Intelligence.
CI professionals use only information that is available to the public, can be scraped from the web, or is available from a third-party data house. Think of this information as ethically sourced, sustainable, and gluten free. The process that a CI pro brings to the table is what makes the difference. We drink information from a firehose, and most of it seems unrelated. In the analytical and business biased mind of a Competitive Intelligence Analyst, we make connections, force data into some sort of structure, and from that structure, we can pull one nugget of insight that could be worth billions to your company.
It’s a much better way to go about gathering data than microfilm in the inside pocket of someone’s trench coat.
You can benefit from Competitive Intelligence starting today. Click here to schedule a call. Let’s start monitoring your industry now, because information is more valuable the sooner you have it.
More examples of Corporate Espionage.
Click here for the Economic Espionage Act of 1996.
Wondering why i do not view any comments on your posts. As intelligent as we both are, where are we heading?
This is now January 2024. The clock is ticking. Can YOU make $1k turn into $100m? That is the challenge we are BOTH going to take, moving forward. i invite you to research my past. See what has been done. As yourself, i have made others rich. Yet they do not have ethics in this day and time. Knew this from the beginning. Yet i was just practicing for the main event. Working for others only makes others wealthy. It is time to accumulate. 😎
Then we will re-establish an ethical foundation for many new businesses to follow. An…