COLLECTING INFORMATION FROM HUMAN SOURCES FOR COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE
COLLECTING INFORMATION FROM HUMAN SOURCES FOR COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE

Summary/Abstract: The collection of information has evolved continuously throughout history, undergoing a series of transformations closely related to the development of the information sources. Over the last decades, these evolutions have been observed not only at the level of the intelligence community, but also at the level of the business environment, with the development and implementation of the competitive intelligence functions within the companies, on a larger scale. It is a known fact that many competitive intelligence professionals claim that they use HUMINT in their daily activity, often without clearly explaining what they are referring to. With regard to this topic, we believe that more transparency is needed, due to the fact that HUMINT is being also used by the government intelligence agencies to designate the secret human sources. This paper briefly analyses how business information should be collected by the competitive intelligence professionals, the types of sources with which they operate, as well as the way in which HUMINT must be approached in competitive intelligence, in order to align with the applicable Romanian legislation and the SCIP Code of Ethics.

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