INTELIGÊNCIA COMPETITIVA E O CASO DE UM ARRANJO PRODUTIVO LOCAL DE ELETRÔNICA BRASILEIRO

Information is major asset in organizational contexts in which competition, technological innovation and reduced distances have turned decision-making processes and time spent on it into important competitive advantages. Competitive intelligence (CI) is an enabling tool to inform, qualify and streamline business decision making and an instrument to support the competitive challenges. However, CI has been usually studied at the level of individual enterprises and this study aims to verify its possibilities and motivation for use within social inter-related groups of companies. Thus, this paper aims to contribute theoretically and empirically to the subject colletive CI within a set of small-sized companies defined as a Local Productive Arrangement, LPA, in the Valley of Electronics of Santa Rita do Sapucai (MG/, Brazil). As to the method, a survey was conducted within a population of 128 small-sized companies, having been administered questionnaires to 95 companies. It was observed that existed interest in sharing strategic information and intelligence on all the dimensions of the micro and macro organizational environment. This could in the future be reflected in more effective decision-making processes, thus allowing the organizations in the LPA better conditions to stay ahead of current and future challenges.