Cross-border Competitive Intelligence

A Competitive Intelligence (CI) individual is faced with diverse challenges when dealing with cross-border data collection processes.  During the planning phase, certain differences should be addressed.  These elements that constitute these differences would be culture, language, and information sources.  During the collection phase, the gathering of required data also needs to consider the same differences as should be addressed during the planning phase.

Expertise in the cross-border CI function involves thorough cultural assessment in foreign markets.  The cultural variables include the effectiveness of different collection methods in foreign markets that should be considered by the CI individual when gathering all the relevant primary and secondary information.

The CI researcher needs to identify such problems like comparability, reliability, and validation of data.  Availability of data, especially secondary information sources, is the case in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Western Europe but probably not in many other countries.  Meanwhile, comparability will be focused here further.

A cross-border CI often neglects to address the challenge of comparability of available data.  It is critical that the data be comparable.  Comparability is important because the data is collected from different countries for analysis to produce intelligence.  The secondary data needs to be fully understood and the meaning of the data recognized at the same time.  This could be quite tough considering that words change meaning due to linguistic and cultural differences and could affect the data gathered by the cross-border CI.

Challenges in cross-border trade are experienced by several countries.  In the case of importing and exporting, problems may occur when official trade statistics of two countries do not match.  Between two countries, indirect trade is the culprit.  However, some countries have already reconciled their trade statistics.  In the case of linguistic differences, foreign markets can use common everyday terms differently.  The concept of supermarket in Korea and Japan is more like the concept of department store in North America.

The best first step is to determine useful secondary information from the United Nations and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).  These International organizations also offer information that is presented and collected under common standards.  Diverse aspects of the cross-border CI data gathering are impacted by the comparability of secondary data.  There are implications to areas such as information requirements and research decisions, setting expectations, and cost of the project.  An expert cross-border CI is knowledgeable and efficient in searching relevant information from published sources.