For specialists and nonspecialists alike, this perceptive selection of the newest and up and coming tools and techniques of competitive intelligence, offering a well balanced combination of theory and practice. It shows how advances in computers and technology have accelerated progress in CI management, and the ways in which CI has affected (and been affected by) all major business functions and processes. It explores applications to organizations of various sizes and types, in both the public and private sectors. Editors Fleisher and Blenkhorn link leading-edge research in CI to advances in current practice, and balance pragmatic against conceptual concerns. Analysts, strategists and organizational decision makers at higher levels will find the book especially valuable, as they seek to make sense of the business environment and assess their organizations' evolving, dynamic places in it.

The pace of change in today's global, competitive economy is greater than at any time in recorded history. Thus, as never before, companies need better tools for business and competitive analysis. The book surveys applications of CI that are critical to business processes, such as mergers and acquisitions, and to evolving industries, such as biotechnology. They focus on how push and pull Internet technologies affect data gathering and analysis and how CI can be managerially assessed using multiple evaluative approaches, unavailable until now in the public domain. They then turn to the future, and lay out some startling yet plausible viewpoints on what the next frontiers of competitive intelligence will be and how organizations can and must ready themselves for them.

CRAIG S. FLEISHER is Dean of the Faculty of Business, University of New Brunswick-Saint John, Canada./e Author of two award winning books and more than 100 articles in his fields, he was one of the first members of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) and is now Coordinator of SCIP's Canadian Technology Triangle Chapter. Dr. Fleisher has held managerial positions in industry and lists among his various consulting clients, past and present, Alcan, Bell Canada, IBM, Imperial Oil, and Philip Morris.

DAVID L. BLENKHORN is Professor of Marketing in the School of Business and Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada./e Among his various consulting clients in business, government, and other sectors have been Amoco Petroleum, Bell Canada, Canadian General Electric, and Cathay Pacific Airways.