GAINING AN EDGE ON RIVALS.

• Author: LEWIS, PETE
• Position: Competitive Intelligence

COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE REQUIRED IN TODAY'S HIGH-TECH MARKETPLACE

Want to learn what's happening in Colorado's high-tech economy? Forget about newspapers, magazines and trade publications. Turn off your television. Log off the Internet. If you want to find out what's really happening in today's business world, you may want to go out to lunch with Lew House.

"I can sit around any of the restaurants located near a lot of these high-tech companies and it's amazing what I'll overhear people talking about over lunch," says House, the president of Louisville, Colo.-based Competitive Technology Intelligence Inc. "People have no idea the importance of the information they possess. It's information they discuss casually because they have no idea about its value."

House does. He's in the fast-growing field of competitive intelligence, defined as the process of monitoring the competitive environment. It involves the legal and ethical gathering of information, systematic analysis of that information and the controlled dissemination of the resulting intelligence to decision makers within a company Companies of any size can use it, and it can help with decisions involving marketing, R&D, investing tactics and long-term business strategies.

Information is only a piece of the puzzle. In today's data-speed business environment, it's not enough to gather information about your market and keep track of the competition. You almost need a crystal ball -- or at least some tools to effectively predict the future or anticipate your competition's next move.

Businesses increasingly are turning to practitioners of competitive intelligence such as House to decipher competitors' strategies, spot trends and patterns before they become apparent in the marketplace, and anticipate changes in the competitive environment. House is the coordinator of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals. SCIP was formed in 1986 and has about 7,000 members worldwide and about 130 members in Colorado. About 75 percent to 80 percent of SCIP's members are employed full-time by corporations. Twenty percent to 25 percent are independent consultants.

"Most large and many medium-sized companies have an internal department that performs the competitive intelligence function," says Stu Perlmeter, president of First Resource Inc., a Littleton-based competitive intelligence firm. "Along the Front Range, I'd say there are 30 to 40 companies with some kind of...