How Net Assessment Can Boost Competitive Intelligence Performance?

In the business sector, Competitive Intelligence (CI) units are often responsible for overseeing the assessment delivered to the top executives regarding competitors’ threats and opportunities and comprehending the meaning of external changes in the related markets. Unfortunately, there is insufficient attention to how these units can be more valuable and help corporations avoid strategic surprises. This paper offers a new concept that will create better value using the Net Assessment approach in corporations. The approach, as detailed in my recent book, ‘We Never Expected That: A Comparative Study of Failures in National and Business Intelligence” (Barnea, 2021), illustrates the practicality of transplanting strategies from the national intelligence sphere to bolster business intelligence. It underscores the potential for cross-pollination of ideas and improvement between these two domains. Net Assessment, a robust framework for analyzing national security threats, has been a cornerstone of the United States defense establishment's strategy for years, yielding significant results. This paper advocates for its integration into the toolkit of CI units and executives, underscoring its potential to deliver substantial performance enhancements for corporations.