The French School of Economic Warfare: What does it teach?

The famous Ecole de Guerre Économique in France, is the research focus topic of this interesting article published in the most recent issue of the Canadian Business Magazine. It is atempt to understand some of the aspects that make the difference in the teaching methods and philosophy of this institution concerning the fields of Competitive Intelligence and Strategic Intelligence as academics disciplines and fields of practice.
The title of the article is "Spies like them". Here is the the link:  http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/51240--spies-like-them

Mining´'Foresightful' data in the Public Sphere

Here and there, some people and their organizations are  becoming aware of what they believe, could be a hidden capability available in the vast amount of public Mass Media sources, social media tools and alike, made available in the World Wide Web: the capability to provide latent 'foresightful' data for 'foresightful' purposes.

Every day millions of individuals, companies and other institutions in differents regions across the world fed the so called 'Public Sphere' - as defined by the german philosopher Jugern Habermas (a digital approach of this concept it is now, aparently classified as Public Sphere 2.0) - with what some people are starting to believe could be, highly valuable data in terms of Foresight. Which data, exactly? Well, it seems mostly, qualitative one: opinions, feelings, thoughts, bits of information about facts and events as they happen in real time.
Is that awareness a growing trend?
So far, we don't know, but it seems that  certain types of Text Mining and Content Analysis Technologies could play a important role in this subject. We came to know recently that Research Programs are beeing launched or sponsered by some National Intelligence Authorities in order to develop even more powerful technologies able to 'predict' (as far as we could do something like that, I would say) events like revolutions, humanitarian crises, economic collapses and disease outbreaks.
How far could these thecnologies go in terms of 'prediction' and accuracy? Maybe to soon to know...
It is always very interesting to find out tools that are being used /tested in emerging fields (on Science & Tecnhology, Research Topics, Public issues) and, at the same time, see some of this tools, in some way, public available on the web for the large community of people/internauts who surf the Internet looking for emerging wordlwide trends.
An insteresting example that I've just find out (in the field of 'mining web data for Foresight purposes') is the annual "Failed State Index" developed by The Fund for Peace. In this case, the sources of the Index are "digitized news articles, essays, magazine pieces, speeches, and government and non-government reports", with social media (blogs and alike) excluded.
Please check the link to explore this tool: http://www.fundforpeace.org/global/?q=fsi

Foresight Human capabilities or just Foresight capabilities?

For those who work on content and analysis based on dynamic information sources (intelligence consultants including) here are two recently peace of news worth reading. The first one is about Narrative Science, an American company which according with the International Herald Tribune have developed a software tool capable of writing 'high quality content' in real time – based on text or numbers - without any human intervention. You can check the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/computer-generated-articles-are-gaining-traction.html?scp=1&sq=narrative%20science&st=cse
But, actually the most interesting is the second peace of news which tell us just this: applying tone and geograpahical analysis to a 30 year old worldwide news archive, global news tone is found to have forecast an extraordinary sequence of major events, namely, the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, inclunding the removal of egiptian President Mubarak, and also estimated, as well, Osama Bin Laden’s likely hiding place in Northern Pakistan. You can read all the details about this interesting breaktroughs on the September edition of First Monday Journal here: http://www.firstmonday.org/

Intelligence & Scanning by Lesca

Um dos autores-chave das abordagens de ´"Intelligence" aplicada ao mundo das organizações (chamemos-lhe em línguas ou designações diferentes Competitive Intelligence, ou Veille Strategique, Inteligência Competitiva, ou muitas outras) é o Prof. Humbert Lesca.

Para os que desejam consultar um manual introdutório à sua abordagem sobre Intelligence, traduzida no que ele designou de "La Methode L.E.Scanning" (jogando, curiosamente, com o seu próprio nome) fica aqui um link onde gentilmente o professor permite aos internautas descarregarem livremente um exemplar do seu livro"Veille Strategique. La Methode L.E.Scanning" de 2003.

Eis então o link: http://www.veille-strategique.org/docs/livre.htm 

Online Information Sources for Intelligence

A nice compilation of information sources and resources for Competitive Intelligence made by Sabrina I. Pacifici.  Usefull to build up a good research base on geographic markets, business trends, organizations, decision makers, business people, and more, all over the world. The selection conveys a strong american view about the online information sources available on the web, but still, it is a nice compilation of this kind of sources.
You can check it here: http://www.llrx.com/features/ciguide.htm