A Study On Developing Business Of Competitive Intelligence Of The SW Information Center

Nowadays the competitions between firms have become more and more severe in the environment of market economy. Any firm who needs to survive and develop must understand his opponents thoroughly. Competitive Intelligence is the resource any firm needs to obtain under market economy. A firm can not always be a winner unless he can get sufficient "intelligence". There is an old Chinese saying "know the enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat". The firm's needs for intelligence have been mounting up day by day, hence a large market appeared, institutions that provide competitive intelligence for all walks of life has grew in number. And now it has become a new industry----competitive intelligence servings.We once had different understanding and interpretation in the literature. But in order to have communication with experts around the world, we have reached agreement on the similarity and differences between "information" and "intelligence". Intelligence is the outcome of deep processing of the information. It has the connotation of information, wisdom and intelligence. It differs from general information because of its specific usage. Competitive Intelligence has the characteristics of target-specific, purposeful, strategic and well-planned. A large amount of competitive intelligence is needed because of the harsh competition in the world. The arising of competitive intelligence servings is the outcome of that competition. The institutions that offer competitive intelligence service to the firms adopt a customer-induced competitive intelligence system. Therefore a long-term corporation can be established between the institutions and the customers. The institutions can have different ways to collect competitive intelligence, such as bench-marking, patent intelligence analysis and the analyses of the role of high-tech. U. S. and Japan have their leading place in the circle of competitive intelligence. And competitive intelligence is developing fast in our country. This paper examines the main framework of competitive intelligence servings and market subdivision. It also analyzes many operation patterns such as surrounding monitoring, business monitoring and analyzing, market survey and also strategies consultation. It also predicts the developing trends in this field, that is, it will become a large industry. This paper analyzes and discusses how the SW information center develops the services in offering competitive intelligence. As a well-known information providing institution, the SW information center has already offered this kind of service and successfully exploring "Enterprise Competitor Intelligence System", but it not very effectively used. The author uses some theories on strategies management, i.e. SWOT mode and VRIO analyzing framework to interpret this phenomenon, and parses its competitive competence and provides some orientations and strategies for developing its business of offering competitive intelligence.