Anti-competitive intelligence case

The essence of anti-competitive intelligence activities is that enterprises actively resist competitors' intelligence collection activities of their core information through legitimate means. Therefore, anti-competitive intelligence activities include not only studying the defensive ways and means of the enterprise itself, but also fully analyzing the competitive intelligence activities of competitors in order to protect all kinds of core secret information of the enterprise.

Selin believes that in order to do a good job in defense, enterprises must first know what the information source of competitive intelligence is and intercept the outflow of important information from the source. Let's look at the classification of competitive intelligence information:

Competitive intelligence researchers divide competitive intelligence information into primary sources and secondary sources. The initial source information mainly exists in all aspects of enterprise management, such as production, research and development, marketing, personnel activities and so on. , that is, the information source generated directly from the investigation enterprise; Replication refers to the information that appears on various carriers after processing the original information.

Primary sources and secondary sources, also known as first-hand information and second-hand information, according to this classification, we classify the main sources of competitive intelligence as follows.

(A) the initial source

1. Within the target enterprise. As can be seen from the above table, in order to deeply understand all aspects of information of an enterprise, most of the contents must be generated from within the investigated enterprise. By going to the sales department and the marketing department to investigate the workshops and factories of enterprises, you can get in touch with a large number of workshop workers, factory supervisors and salespeople, promoters and marketing managers, and learn a lot of first-hand information from competitors, which is the most valuable original information.

2. Target enterprise partners. Partners include distributors, agents, upstream suppliers, advertising companies, transportation companies and banks. These institutions are the necessary links in the information diffusion of target enterprises, such as product positioning, advertising, price discounts, promotion and other information, which can be obtained through the business activities of partners and their organizations of the target enterprises, and some valuable information can also be obtained through banks.

3. Original data. The original data source includes two parts. First, external organizations that have mastered enterprise data according to law, such as industrial and commercial bureau, tax bureau, patent office, etc., can obtain enterprise registration files, tax payment records, patent applications and other information from these institutions; The second is the internal information of the enterprise, such as enterprise marketing promotion plan, sales report, financial report, etc.

The information obtained from the original source is called first-hand information, which is the value of competitive intelligence. However, the first-hand information is not equal to the original information. Many enterprises take obtaining the original information of competitors as the goal of intelligence work, which is a wrong understanding and behavior and easy to violate the bottom line of morality and law. Obtaining information from the initial source, as defined by us, is more valuable information obtained from the target staff through interpersonal communication, interviews, etc. A large number of information revealed by interviewees has been judged, processed and analyzed by intelligence personnel.

(2) Middle school students

1. Traditional mass media. Newspapers, magazines, radio, television and other traditional media have a wide audience and a large amount of information, especially some economic and financial newspapers and magazines and professional industry newspapers and magazines. There are many corporate reports, from which many valuable sources of information can be found.

2. Internet. The massive information sources on the Internet have a growing impact on people's lives, and almost all industry information and business units can be found on the Internet. Internet has become a platform for social and information exchange. Thousands of people communicate online every day, and a lot of information can be obtained from the small circle of professionals. In particular, the emergence of blogs and Weibo makes the exchange of information more targeted, which is a place that competitive intelligence personnel should pay close attention to and make good use of.

3. Stock exchange. More and more enterprises go public. Today, influential enterprises in various industries in China are listed on the stock exchanges in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hongkong, including the United States. As long as it is a listed company, its basic economic activities should be publicly disclosed. There are also some important events of enterprises, such as investment and acquisition, important personnel changes, including quarterly and monthly production and sales data, which can be inquired in the information of the stock exchange.

4. Information service institutions. An information center or commercial organization that provides information services, specializing in information collection, processing and analysis. For example, trade associations, government information centers, science and technology information centers (information research institutes), business intelligence agencies, etc. Some organizations also sell industry reports of various industries through the Internet, some of which are valuable information.

5. literature. Documents include books, yearbooks, business directories, yellow pages, patent documents, technical files, scientific reports, etc. Literature is characterized by a large amount of information, a high degree of openness, and strong reliability and systematicness of information, such as statistical yearbooks and patent documents, which are all open and searchable services of the government.

6. Database. Database is a modern information resource mainly used for retrieval. Countries all over the world are constantly developing and utilizing the database industry, and there are thousands of databases in the United States alone. The world-famous Dialog database system, its commercial database part can provide various information such as enterprise and product catalogue, market credit analysis, investment feasibility analysis, competitor analysis, etc. Financial Times, Reuters News, Dow Jones Financial, etc. Both have databases, and the United States also has databases of different industries, including chemical industry, medicine and metals. The database construction in China is lagging behind, but some industry data can be queried by the competent ministries. In addition, some commercial organizations provide company information and credit database query, such as Dunbar's and Celine's. (Excerpted from Business Intelligence War-Collection and Application of Enterprise Competitive Intelligence)

Secondly, enterprises should know some ways to obtain competitive intelligence by playing the "edge ball" and try to avoid "accidentally" revealing important information.

The following are some common practices for enterprises that attach importance to competitive intelligence to obtain information:

▲ Relevant personnel of public relations target enterprises

▲ Dig away key competitors.

▲ Look for former employees who consult competitors.

▲ Visit competitors indirectly through consultants.

▲ Visit rival companies and production plants in a fictional capacity.

▲ Visit the customers of competitors.

▲ Visit the upstream suppliers of competitors.

▲ Visit the downstream dealers of competitors.

▲ Visit marketing, design, advertising and other partners who cooperate with competitors.

▲ Check the loan records of rival banks through certain means.

▲ Consult competitors' documents and files in relevant government departments through certain means.

▲ Participate in various meetings to obtain opponent information.

▲ Analyze the product advertisements and job advertisements of competitors in various media.

▲ Buy your opponent's products for process reduction.

▲ Buy the industrial waste of your opponent.

(Excerpted from Business Intelligence War-Collection and Application of Enterprise Competitive Intelligence)

Finally, share the case of Huawei's anti-competitive intelligence:

Huawei: Focus on patents and anti-intelligence.

Huawei's intelligence work focuses on collecting the best practices of international competitors and leading enterprises, as well as international leading management methods and patented technologies. When there was a shortage of funds in the early years, Huawei adopted the "pressure principle" and invested heavily in core technologies and patent research and development in order to make key breakthroughs in some core technologies. A complete methodology and information system has been formed in the collection, analysis and patent protection of patent technical information.

Specifically including:

1. Intelligence gathering and R&D positioning. In combination with the needs of international competition and the needs and capabilities of enterprises, Huawei systematically investigates and statistically analyzes the technical content, personnel (patent applicants and inventors), time (patent application time, patent announcement date) and place (acceptance bureau, designated country and patent items of the same family) in patent documents, providing decision support for formulating enterprise R&D priorities and strategies;

2. Intelligence integration and value judgment. According to the number of patent applications, the development history, development trend, present stage and maturity of the technology are counted to judge the research and development value content of the technology;

3. Intelligence analysis and decision support. Through the systematic collection and analysis of global patents, Huawei predicts the development direction and market trend of new technologies in the future, and provides reference for the formulation of the company's development strategy. At the same time, identify and determine the patents that may compete with competitors, and put forward targeted strategies such as evasion, invalidation and revocation to avoid infringing others' patents. In 2008, Huawei applied for the number of patents overseas, ranking first in the world, and won the global company innovation award, also because of the advanced RF Remote technology (Remote? Radio? Head) has changed the traditional impression that China enterprises can only imitate but cannot create.

With the continuous enhancement of Huawei's R&D capabilities and innovation capabilities, Huawei has also done a very good job in anti-competitive intelligence and trade secret protection. Most of these R&D achievements exist in the form of trade secrets. Huawei's information security department has nearly 200 people, whose main job is to protect trade secrets. According to Huawei executives, its trade secret protection system is much stricter than that of American enterprises.

Huawei's trade secrets and information security protection have three layers: one is system design, the other is management authorization design, and the third is technical design. In terms of system design, Huawei has a set of management documents that give it the highest power. If an engineer violates the corresponding management regulations, he will bear very serious consequences. In terms of management authorization, Huawei has established processes and institutional norms based on the international information security architecture. For example, Huawei adopts the principles of "relevance" and "minimum contact" in the control of "entrance security" and authorization. All documents and technologies are authorized according to their confidentiality level, and only absolutely necessary people can access relevant technologies, and the access is carried out under corresponding control and supervision. To this end, Huawei's White Paper on Information Security clearly stipulates and restricts this process. In terms of technical design means, Huawei's R&D network is disconnected from the Internet. In the global synchronous development system in different places, the achievements developed by researchers are not on the local computer, but on a controlled server. Any information sent by the server is backed up. If there is any problem, you can check it back.

Huawei has also set up a strong intellectual property department, which not only includes the elites in the domestic intellectual property field, but also reaches or even exceeds the proportion of legal personnel required by international enterprises, which shows that enterprises attach importance to intellectual property rights.

In addition to strictly protecting the core intellectual property rights of enterprises, Huawei also tries its best to hardware its software inventions in order to realize the value of intellectual property rights and increase the cost of imitation, copying and possible theft by competitors. Huawei believes that software can only survive if it is tied to hardware. Therefore, although 70% of Huawei's research and development results are software, Huawei relies on special equipment to bind with hardware, which raises the threshold for infringement. (Excerpted from the 39th issue of Celine Competitive Intelligence Monthly)