One of the best articles on the subject is Competitive Intelligence: The Ups and Downs of Elicitation by ChiefZilla himself David Carpe.

David's a respected figure in the CI industry, and this article looks at the closely guarded and mysterious art of elicitation.

It's funny, I first heard the term many years ago when I started studying NLP - another mysterious art (actually, there's more than a few NLP terms in this article)

David describes it as "open dialogue...with a purpose", which I think is pretty much spot on. If it's done well, the other person doesn't know it's happening.

This is my favourite quote:

"Search engines, while powerful, continue to fall short when it comes to efficiently delivering deep insight....Skilled primary researchers can glean tremendous insight through conversations with key industry participants - information that might otherwise never be found or is not available through secondary research. This is the main reason why primary researchers prefer to go to the source, and recognize the need for a deep dive into the watery recesses of other minds."

Go to the source...I like that.

Labels: competitive intelligence