Competitive Intelligence and Knowledge Management's Affinities and Relations: Developing a Model

Knowledge management is the process through which corporate knowledge is used to improve organizational performance. Essentially it looks at managing internal knowledge processes, developing the efficient usage of all information required for corporate decisions. Competitive intelligence (CI) is a process for gathering usable knowledge about the external business environment. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the synergy between Competitive Intelligence, Knowledge Management. As practices; both CI and KM have the same fundamental requirements. Each need a strategic purpose, each depends on having a corporate culture that encourages people to create and share information and knowledge, each requires skills and competencies to carry out the processes involved, and each is facilitated by the same technology tools. But they have some differences. In this paper we show these differences and similarities.