Decision making in small and medium enterprises and information requirements for competitive intelligence

What information do SMEs need to make the decisions about being located competitively in their environment? This question mainly concerns the domain of the competitive intelligence (in French: economic intelligence). However competitive intelligence (CI) is a quite recent domain and has developed few structured methods. More widely, requirements of decision support information are known to be difficult, in particular as regards SMEs, and particularly as regards weak or unstructured decisions, which is the case in tactical and strategic decisions. We led a three-year research program focused on the design of a structured method to analyse the need for CI by SME managers. This project had several phases. One was dedicated to a survey of 70 SME managers in the Midi-Pyrénées region. This paper presents this survey. In section 1 we propose a definition of CI and outline the reasons why it is necessary to analyse the use of CI by the SMEs. In section 2, we shall present the structure of the survey. The third section describes some of the results of the survey.