Introduction to Competitive Intelligence

Abstract

Pharmaceutical competitive intelligence (CI) entails defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence—both non-proprietary and proprietary—on pharmaceutical products, customers, competitors, and any aspect of a particular functional area needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization (e.g., an expected return on investment or strategies based on the loss of patent protection). It is intimately tied to the processes involved in due diligence, and, for that reason, an overview of the processes of due diligence for product-based investments will be used as a platform to determine the elements of CI that are critical for upper management when making investment or strategic decisions.