Expert Talks: How to set up corporate CI units? - Facilitated by Hans Hedin of the Global Intelligence Alliance (GIA).

For me the most valuable panel not only because I’d have wished this discussion never to end! Extremely well prepared by Hans (whom I had the pleasure to meet the first time here in Bad Nauheim) this panel included an extremely interesting, high calibre mix of professionals.

Michel Bernaiche whom I consider a friend by now - after using his competitive intelligence model as a best practice case in my work, having experienced a couple of very impressive presentations on his CI function’s capabilities and organization of the intelligence operation and bouncing tons of great, futuristic strategic and conceptual CI ideas back and forth – laid out how and why his organization wants to further build and complete what they consider a world class CI operation.

Knowing a thing or two about Michels ambitions and successes I would actually claim his CI operation to already BE a world class model for his industry!

Some of Michel’s key success and development goals and factors consist of (in my words):
- Call for action including follow-up that should support accountability of the CI tasks
- Awareness about competitive intelligence inside the own organization
- Early warnings and acting upon them (tight into accountability)
- Counter Intelligence

Among the many learnings and messages I took home from that session I’d like to stress Hans’ statement (actually it was based in a strategic hint given by Michel before) that a strongly established mission statement might be one of the very keys to set up a CI function.

While Yulia rubbed the concept of constant and never ending learning and networking in, Michel gave away his major goal for a CI setup:

“Focus on the physical setup of your competitive intelligence processes and push for implementation too!”

It was a pity this session ended so soon, many thanks for to the panellists and Hans to facilitate very professionally!