Synergy Between Competitive Intelligence and Knowledge Management - a key for Competitive Advantage

The market orientation perspective states that organizations have no option but to look beyond internal business activities and to integrate events from the external environment. These are complex, turbulent and rapidly changing. Firms today are led to utilize information and the knowledge of companies because to succeed in the information economy comes from harnessing these resources. Knowledge and information become strategic, paramount and must therefore be managed. Integrating knowledge management (KM) and competitive intelligence encourage the use of these resources, improve their quality and allow an enterprise to respond more rapidly to changing business conditions. The aim of this article, is to present similarities, differences, benefits of KM and CI for the organization through the study of current literature. Besides, we present critical success factors needed to achieve a successful implementation of these two processes, and further, highlight the importance of KM and CI integration for the organization to compete in the knowledge economy.