Article
Contemporary Practices of Intelligence Support for Competitiveness
This paper focuses on the practices, assessment approaches, procedures, and applied aspects of competitive intelligence (CI). The study relies upon a survey of CI practitioners conducted in 2019 and a comparison of its results with a similar survey in 2006. It was found that companies spend the time devoted to this activity mainly on processes that go beyond collecting information, including planning, analysis, communications, and management. Most enterprises have official divisions and profile managers. The results are used to perform a variety of strategic and tactical tasks.
The main sources of information are the Internet, company employees, customers, and industry experts. Compared to 2006, a new key resource has emerged — social networks. Of the analytical methods, SWOT analysis and the study of competitors are most often used. Several channels of communication are used simultaneously to disseminate the received information, mainly email and presentations are used. Key performance criteria are customer satisfaction and the number of decisions made based on the information gathered.
A comparative analysis revealed that over the period separating the surveys of 2006 and 2019, the function of the CR has become more formalized. The share of companies with centralized divisions and CI managers has grown. Currently, this activity more often goes beyond the simple profiling and evaluation of competitors. Technology assessment, economic, and political analysis are more actively practiced.
The Informational paradigm of discourse to the XXIst century is replaced by communicative; due to the spread of the Internet, new features and models of communication based on the subject-to-subject concept of hypertext are formed. Tekstogennost’ as a set of anthropogenically-technical factors of generation, transmission, exchange texts of public communication, leading to the formation and operation of new types of vehicles and generators of information in all spheres of life, which have an impact on them, becomes the essential characteristic of socio-economic discourse. The role of the professional communication support (PR, mass media) of all processes becomes more essential. Thus, the textual, philological, humanitarian dimension determines the effectiveness of social development.
In many organizations implementation of innovation is initiated by the management with application of so-cold “top-down” approach: strategic targets and key success factors with the initiatives of its achieving are formed and consolidated in different regulations, procedures, rules and instructions, which are brought to concrete employees later. The feedback from employees is occurred on the fact of initiative execution in form of corrective procedures locally, but the forming of innovation is still the top-management prerogative.
Such centric approach is mostly demotivating approach for initiative employees, who generate, implement and use innovation ideas. For this problem correction hybrid methods are used. The creation of special department inside the company is supposed to be done. It bears duties of innovation catalyst (usually R&D and HR departments have this role). Among other things this department is responsible for inspiration of average executive on development of innovation, determination and consolidation of corporate values and standards of behavior. In the end, the employees orientation on single corporate targets, the increase of corporate spirit would again “top-down” imposed and the department is just the retransmitter of values that are determined by the management.
How should the politics of relations between colleagues, clients and partners be naturally created and how to establish the awareness by the company employees of their personal responsibility and their personal role in corporate values realization, creation of innovation atmosphere inside the organization that does not resist the innovation? The approach, which is described in this article, supposes the forming of distributed network inside the organization with the transfer to it the general effort in the sphere of creating innovations and implementing the corporate ethics principals.
The article is based on the introductory part of the collection on “Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches” (2009). The author presents a brief review of concepts that have been lately employed in research on material or technological culture. He attempts to show that different disciplines do in fact use adjacent notions and concepts in thinking about materiality, and tries to delineate ways of bringing the different research traditions to a unified platform that could serve as a theoretical foundation for the complex materialistic study of technological culture.
Peculiarities of making of managerial decisions in modern business systems, predetermined by observation of the basic principles, are shown: constant monitoring of external environment for determining new possibilities and actual problems and determining the need for managerial decisions; founding on materials of marketing research, conduct of marketing communications for informing and supporting loyalty of interested parties in the process of implementation of decisions; and striving for increasing or at least preserving the uniqueness and effectiveness of business system during decision making (criterion of optimality of decisions).
This volume focuses on innovative approaches to teaching foreign language courses offered to non-language degree students. It includes essays related to the innovative use of ICTs, new developments in methodology, approaches to course and materials design, and the contribution of language theory to foreign language teaching. As the book brings together researchers and practitioners working in a variety of contexts, it provides detailed insight into ways the same challenges are dealt with in different educational environments.