When a Motorola employee visited a rival firm’s booth at a recent international trade show, the Schaumburg-based worker was–perhaps not surprisingly–asked to leave.
The startling aspect of the incident was the identity of the person policing the booth: He was a domestic security agent from that competitor’s country, the equivalent of an FBI agent.
“I learned that they had a heck of an intelligence program,” said Joseph Goldberg, Motorola’s director for business intelligence.
“They had cameras in the booth, obviously. Now our trade show guys know to be prepared,” Goldberg said Friday at a business intelligence conference in Chicago.
“I don’t mind talking to the competition as long as I come away with 51 percent of the information,” said Goldberg, who spent eight years with the Central Intelligence Agency before joining Motorola.
Business intelligence is as old as the republic, starting with colonial entrepreneurs who memorized plans for British textile machinery. The businessmen built their own machines–and textile empires–in the New World based on the purloined plans. As for formally organized competitive intelligence units, Motorola has one of the oldest, dating to the 1980s, Goldberg said.
Still, new trends have developed. Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Motorola and other global companies focused mostly on protecting company secrets at trade shows.
But now Corporate America also is asking the same sleuths to help evaluate potential threats to their facilities–both domestic and overseas.
“Sometimes you forget that corporations are symbols of U.S. power,” Goldberg said. “Then you ask how competitors might take advantage of disruptions in the supply chain that might arise if you can’t get planes in the air or keep certain plants operating.”
Even small manufacturers are turning to intelligence, according to Erik Glitman, managing director of Vermont-based Fletcher/CSI, a corporate intelligence firm.
“It’s now trickling down past the Fortune 1000 companies to companies with just 200 employees,” Glitman said.
Yet Dean Teglia, a manufacturing consultant with Accenture, cautioned that companies should focus more on learning their rivals’ business processes rather than learning how to copy their product.
“I mean, a battery is a battery,” Teglia said. “It’s more important to understand the mechanics of the business before the product hits the street,” Teglia said.
