Business Resources MBA 599: Assurance of Learning Competitors

U/I1. Buying competitor’s garbage
E/L2. Dissecting competitor’s products
E/L3. Taking competitor’s plant tours anonymously
E/L4. Counting tractor-trailer trucks leaving competitors loading bays
E/L5. Studying aerial photographs of competitor’s facilities
U/L6. Analyzing competitor’s labor contracts
E/L7. Analyzing competitor’s help-wanted ads
E/L8. Quizzing customers and buyers about the sales of competitor’s products
U/L9. Infiltrating customers’ and competitors’ business operations
U/L10. Quizzing suppliers about competitors’ level of manufacturing
U/I11. Using customers to buy out phony bids
U/I12. Encouraging key customers to reveal competitive information
E/I13. Quizzing competitors’ former employees
E/I14. Interviewing consultants who may have worked with competitors
E/L15. Hiring key managers away from competitors
U/L16. Conducting phony job interviews to get competitors’ employees to reveal information
U/L17. Sending engineers to trade meetings to quiz competitors’ technical employees
U/L18. Quizzing potential employees who worked for or with competitors
Two ethical competitive intelligence methodologies that I had trouble classifying were (1) studying aerial photographs of competitor’s facilities and (2) interviewing consultants who may have worked with competitors.
I first marked the study of aerial photographs of competitor’s facilities as unethical because I felt that this was against the company’s privacy. I felt that if the company took great lengths in securing the perimeter of their facilities, in some cases even preventing their employees from taking pictures inside their offices, then it would be illegal for competitors to obtain photographs of their facilities. However, in my search online, I have discovered that as long as the information gathered by a company is in the public domain ADDIN CSL_CITATION { "citationItems" : [ { "id" : "ITEM-1", "itemData" : { "URL" : "/news/how-to-gather-competitive-research/", "accessed" : { "date-parts" : [ [ "2016", "2", "18" ] ] }, "author" : [ { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Hodges", "given" : "Jane", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" } ], "container-title" : "CBS Money Watch", "id" : "ITEM-1", "issued" : { "date-par...