Montserrat Garcia-Alsina

Enabler and inhibitor factors influencing competitive intelligence practices

Purpose – This paper has a twofold aim. Firstly, to give some insight into competitive intelligence practices in a little‐explored area in the field of competitive intelligence: the higher education sector. Secondly, to find out more about the factors influencing competitive intelligence practices, since little research on this subject has been published.Design/methodology/approach – The investigation used a mixed‐methods approach, including face‐to‐face, semi structured interviews with 47 university managers (degree coordinators, deans and vice‐rectors), followed by a semi‐structured questionnaire carried out with 400 degree coordinators and deans and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The interviews informed the questionnaire design.Findings – The survey confirms the proposed frameworks usefulness for analysing the enabler and inhibitor factors in an organisation for promoting efficient competitive intelligence practice and also gives some insight into which factors enable or inhibit the effica...

Competitive intelligence theoretical framework and practices: The case of Spanish universities

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to summarise previous studies to develop a theoretical framework useful to describe and classify competitive intelligence (CI) practices. It is applied to study CI practices developed by Spanish universities, comparing usual practices with those developed during the process of adaptation of degrees to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), with strong challenges. Design/methodology/approach – The research employs a mixed-methods approach (semi-structured interviews and questionnaires) developed in two phases. It has focused on the academic offer, which represents 46.35 per cent of the degrees presented in 2009, belonging to 90.16 per cent of Spanish universities. Findings – The results reveal predominance of incipient and reactive practices, oriented to the tactical level. During the adaptation process, these practices evolved due to the perception of the involvement of universities in the adaptation process. In addition, the proposed theoretical framework could ...

Keyword Extraction from Company Websites for the Development of Regional Knowledge Maps

Regional Innovation Systems describe the relations between actors, structures and infrastructures in a region in order to stimulate innovation and regional development. For these systems the collection and organization of information is crucial. In the present paper we investigate the possibilities to extract information from websites of companies. Especially we consider faceted classification of companies by keyword extraction using a specialized thesaurus. First we identify a number of challenges that arise when we want to extract information about companies from their websites. Then we describe a small scale experiment in which keywords related to economic sectors and commodities are extracted from the websites of over 200 companies. The experiment shows that the approach is at least feasible for the commodities facet. For the sectors facet the simple keyword extraction methods used do not perform well. We find that a good coverage of words in the text by the thesaurus is crucial and that hence the results can be improved by adding more alternative labels to the thesaurus terms. Furthermore, we find that weighting terms according to their relations to other terms on the website instead of using inverse document frequency gives better results than the classical tf.idf weighting of terms.

Challenges to Construct Regional Knowledge Maps for Territories’ Sustainable Development

Knowledge management in organizations is a practice progressively implemented during the last decades. Their value is recognized as an asset to generate competitive advantage. This article translates the knowledge management’s potentials to a geographic territory, and explores how to apply to a territory the framework developed by knowledge management discipline to be applied in companies. The main point is how to build regional knowledge maps to satisfy needs expressed by some actors involved in regional policy and innovation in a territory. This work reports a research in progress, whose objective is to define a methodology to efficiently design territorial knowledge maps. It presents the theoretical background offered by other disciplines that could support knowledge management discipline. These disciplines are on the one hand, regional innovation systems and competitive - territorial intelligence, to explore components involved in a territory, and on the other hand text mining to extract information of big volumes of data contained in diverse sources of information related to a region. It shows also the theoretical framework designed to deal with this research, that identify which components should collect a regional knowledge map (structures, actors, infrastructures, resources and social capital), and how to study the contexts where knowledge is created to innovate and contribute to the regional development. Finally this paper summarizes the potentials and the challenges to construct regional knowledge maps, which constitutes sub lines of research.