The State of Competitive Intelligence within. New Zealand Private and Public Sector Organisations, страница 19

SCIP Code of Ethics for competitive intelligence Professionals

1.  To continually strive to increase the recognition and respect of the profession. 

2.  To comply with all applicable laws, domestic and international. 

3.  To accurately disclose all relevant information, including one's identity and organisation, prior to all interviews. 

4.  To avoid conflicts of interest in fulfilling one's duties. 

5.  To provide honest and realistic recommendations and conclusions in the execution of one's duties. 

6.  To promote this code of ethics within one's company, with third-party contractors and within the entire profession. 

7.  To faithfully adhere to and abide by one's company policies, objectives and guidelines. (SCIP, 2008)

Vision:  Better decisions through competitive intelligence. 

Mission:  SCIP will be the global organisation of choice for professionals engaged in competitive intelligence and related disciplines.  SCIP will be the premier advocate for the skilled use of intelligence to enhance business decision-making and organisational performance (SCIP, 2008).

The Trengrove and Vryenhoek, 1997, competitive intelligence study noted that there was no SCIP New Zealand branch.  Furthermore, Hawkins (2004) found that there was no SCIP association due to the lack of active participants in 2004.  

While the SCIP codes of ethics are honourable, these ideals are based on a western culture and in some countries like China the values would be reflective of the Chinese culture. 

Tao and Prescott reported that in 2000, China had a resource pool of 80,000 Scientific and Technical Information Intelligence Systems practitioners and 10,000 Economic Information System practitioners (2000).  While China has the largest number of competitive intelligence resources, they are in the early stages of competitive intelligence development where best practices have not yet been implemented widely, nor a code of ethics established (Tao and Prescott 2000).  

There is a strong element of espionage within China’s competitive intelligence community and although China has established an anti-unfair competition law which targets illegal business behaviour, such as industrial espionage, only 32 percent of Chinese companies have established a competitive intelligence code of ethics. (Bonthous, 1994).

In 2007, the New Zealand Herald reported that the New Zealand government computers were hacked by a foreign government, believed to be China (2007).  Other examples of Chinese espionage have been documented and state that Chinese espionage is conducted by employing Chinese travellers, scientists, students and business people to develop relationships in order to collect intelligence (Nolan, 1999).  Not only is this a concern, but the American authorities believe China is unable to abide or enforce international trade agreements or protect intellectual property (US Trade, 2007).

Counter Competitive Intelligence

Identified within this report are the competitive intelligence attitude types and the recommendation that competitive intelligence becomes part of everyone’s job description.  It is important to note, however, that “wherever money is exchanged, so is information” so it is almost impossible to stop the release of competitive information from within the company or organisation.  For example, it is necessary for companies to provide annual accounts and comply with the local legislation.

In partnership with competitive intelligence, Counter competitive intelligence can be used as the tool to limit the unplanned information escaping externally.  Prescott (1995) has highlighted that some organisations like Motorola and 3M have not only embraced competitive intelligence, but have gone further and developed Counter competitive intelligence practices.   Counter competitive intelligence can be described as the ‘flip-side’ of competitive intelligence where a counter-intelligence specialist actively limits a competitive intelligence specialist from gathering information and knowledge.