Lucie Bégin

Is the Business Plan a Dated Instrument or an Unavoidable Step for the Entrepreneur

The business plan is an exercise required for all entrepreneurs. Its objective is to provide a framework for entrepreneurial action and obtain the necessary funds to start a new business. However, considering the time needed to prepare it and the low reliability of the forecasts on which it is built, we can doubt its usefulness for the entrepreneur. This working paper presents the exchanges that took place during a roundtable discussion on the usefulness of the business plan. Several speakers from the academic and professional communities discussed the definition of the business plan, its form and its usefulness.

An Interdisciplinary Approach of Competitive Intelligence

The objective of this article is to present a global and systematic approach to business intelligence (IE), which concerns especially the SME. We propose to start from three distinct conceptions of the IE, coming from the military information, the strategic management and the information sciences. This is the result from an original collaboration between various research and teaching areas. With this integrating approach, we would like to contribute to translucence of specific knowledge and to start a real interdisciplinary dialogue, a condition which is necessary for the enrichment of business intelligence models. We conclude in showing the advantages of the formal procedure of IE, for SME.