Legal Factors and Ethical Guidelines

Ethics, or what is deemed to be good or bad in human conduct, is a key issue in all types of research activity. The part of competitive intelligence that focuses on the study of competitors is particularly prone to ethical assessment and is also subject to legal constraints. This is partly because there are many who regard it as an invasion of privacy, and therefore inherently unethical, and partly because there have been widely publicised situations in which the methods used to collect intelligence have been open to criticism. Competitor intelligence suffers from the fact that it is frequently compared with activities that do not adhere to the same ethical standards as other research activities and also that there are organisations that are prepared to break the law in order to acquire intelligence, if the price is right. These organisations are not part of the competitive intelligence community but are trading on the back of the growing demand for competitor intelligence.