Type competitive intelligence seminars in a search engine and dozens pop up, from marginal colleges to organizations with doubtful credentials in the field. This explosion of imitators in competitive intelligence seminars is a compliment to us who started the professional training in this field back in 1996, but it calls for careful consideration by busy managers who should spend their budget wisely. It also calls for deeper understanding what makes competitive intelligence seminars different than other business seminars or college courses.

According to education experts, the content of education usually consists of knowledge, principles and concepts, and the content of training normally consists of skills, abilities and techniques. Competitive intelligence seminars must first teach principles, then create the skills and the self-confidence to apply them to tasks that can determine the manager’s career. In our program, we wanted to make sure that practicing CI under real circumstances would always follow theory, but that confidence building will also follow the practice. The first basic course in intelligence collection, ‘Sources

and Techniques,’ comes with a simulation exercise of trade show human information collection. ‘Competitive Blindspots’ begins with two hours teaching the three main theoretical frames, Porter’s industry and competitor analysis, and Gilad’s blindspots analysis. It then continues in a six hour exercise in applying them to a case study. This ratio is deliberate — training takes much more effort and time than education.

The typical teaching experience in a competitive intelligence programs offered today in the market consists of an instructor frontal teaching or using a PowerPoint presentation, and a passive audience. In our competitive intelligence seminars, the vast majority of class time is spent in the Socratic method of interaction. In our analytical courses, we

coach the students while they apply the techniques themselves. In our management subjects, our faculty serves as mentors, sharing with the students a wealth

of personal experience built over decades of work. Our competitive intelligence seminars share a common assumption: the real experts are the managers themselves. They come to us with deep knowledge of their companies, their industries, and their technologies. We just teach them how to apply it effectively to do intelligence work. When you respect your students as experts, your competitive intelligence seminars become a learning experience, not a superficial transfer of data.

Perspective

Ray Towle, a human resource expert suggests that education starts by examining past accumulated knowledge, while training addresses what the learner will do differently with the newly acquired skills. This is one difference we stress. Managers coming to our program learn to go beyond reporting facts and into producing real intelligence. We push students to do things differently once they go back. The emphasis is on being intelligence professionals rather than human search engines or low-level coordinators of information flows. Otherwise, why spend so much time and money on training?

Faculty

Why is Harvard so revered by executives? Because its faculty is the world leading experts in their fields, with enormous accumulated experience consulting in the real world. The founders of the Fuld-Gilad-Herring Academy of Competitive Intelligence are of that caliber, turning students to leaders in CI.