This section examines competitive intelligence and the relationship of culture. Culture plays a very important role and can be the main inhibitor or the promoter to competitive intelligence. To understand this relationship, the cultural focus and acceptance of competitive intelligence is examined by exploring two different country’s mindsets (New Zealand and Japan) and examines each country’s historical culture, its government’s support of competitive intelligence and academic institutes towards fostering competitive intelligence.
New Zealand was discovered and colonised by the British and followed an English culture & values society. Unlike Japan’s strong group behaviour of gathering and sharing information culture, New Zealand has maintained strong ties with the English system (decision making, financial systems and knowledge sharing), thus limiting the need for knowledge dependence. Only in the late 1990’s, has competitive intelligence been present as a concept (Hawkins, 2004).
Compared with the New Zealand culture, Japan’s historical culture developed a strong group behaviour which had a history of gathering information and sharing competitive intelligence among fellow countrymen. Examples of this culture were demonstrated by rice paddy neighbours working together to obtain water resources (Kahaner, 1996). Japan believes gathering information is a noble calling and will pay dividends to people who shared this concept. In the nineteenth century, when Japan was isolated from the rest of world, Emperor Meiji established programs to gain knowledge about western cultures (i.e. business & economics) and applied these lessons (“Wakon yosa” – ‘Japanese spirit and western knowledge’) to improve Japanese culture. While these programs were established in the nineteenth century, these fundamentals are still being applied today. (Kahaner, 1996).
The role of CI at a government level is equally important, and Baumard (1993) believes that “Economic intelligence” is the ability of using knowledge as the basis of economic advantage and is the key element to enable a country’s competitiveness. Furthermore, as the world develops and international relations shift from ‘geo-politics to geo-economics’, the competitive advantage of countries lie in their ability to strategically manage their knowledge, administrations, industries, people, economic wealth and social welfare.
New Zealand Trade and Enterprise provides funding (consultant grants of up $50,000) to improve companies’ ‘capability and international competitiveness’, which can be used to obtain expertise and assistance to develop international business projects (NZTE, 2009). However, there appears to be no
local agencies offering competitive intelligence as a service or applying competitive intelligence in New Zealand government agencies (Hawkins, 2004).
Japan’s Government heavily supports their economy by using and creating awareness of the importance of competitive intelligence and activity establishing competitive intelligence networks within their country. Walter Barndt (1994) documents that leading Japanese agencies (i.e. Trade & Industry and External Trade, Ministry of International Trade and Japanese External Trade Organisation agencies), businesses, banks and advertising agencies all work together and share competitive advantage knowledge (competitive intelligence) to promote business growth and competitiveness. This form of cooperation can be classed as ‘Intelligent Intrusiveness’, which is a series of actions, like sending agents to the Competitors trade-shows or ‘subscribing to monitoring services’ (Baumard, 1993).
The Japanese Government has also amended its Law of Unfair Competition to protect its core business sectors (manufacturing, marketing practice and/or technical/business information) by prohibiting the acts of obtaining, distributing or using trade secrets (Blenkhorn & Fleisher, 2005), while promoting information intelligence gathering by establishing the Japanese External Trade Organisation as a global government sponsored competitive intelligence agency (Kahaner, 1996).
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