Recent business news shows industrial and business espionage, for that matter intelligence, has increased across the world where countries are experiencing recession. Industrial espionage has been present in the developed countries for a long time now. The extent has increased these days. Over the years, industrial or business or corporate espionage has proven to be a very useful tool for finding new businesses and maximising profit.
Industrial espionage or corporate espionage is conducted for commercial purposes instead of national security purposes. The term is distinct from legal and ethical activities such as examining corporate publications, websites, patent filings, and the like to determine the activities of a corporation and this is normally referred to competitive intelligence. Theoretically, the difference between espionage and legal information gathering is clear. In practice, it is quite difficult to sometimes tell the difference between legal and illegal methods.
Especially if one starts to consider the ethical side of information gathering, the border becomes even more blurred and elusive of definition.
Industrial espionage describes activities such as theft of trade secrets, bribery, blackmail, and technological surveillance. As well as spying on commercial organisations, governments can also be targets of commercial espionage, for example, to determine the terms of a tender for a government contract so that another tenderer can underbid.
Industrial espionage is most commonly associated with technology-heavy industries, particularly the computer, and automobile sectors. In recent years, corporate espionage has taken on an expanded definition. For instance, attempts to sabotage a corporation may be considered corporate espionage; in this sense, the term takes on the wider connotations of its parent word.
For example, the government of France once was alleged to have conducted ongoing industrial espionage against American aerodynamics and satellite companies and vice versa. The Clinton administration has been accused of shifting US intelligence assets from terrorism targets and towards economic targets to "level the playing field" for US companies competing abroad.
There is also risk in this business. In 2001 Proctor and Gamble admitted spying on rival Unilever for information on its shampoos. Boeing was punished by the US Air Force in 2003 for resorting to espionage in order to better its defence rival Lockheed Martin.
There's another aspect of business intelligence. Business intelligence represents a collection of processes, tools and technologies helpful in achieving more profit by considerably improving the productivity, sales and service of an enterprise. By applying these methods, corporate data can be organised, analysed in a better way and then converted into a useful knowledge of information needed to initiate a profitable business action. Thus it is about turning a raw, collected data into intelligent information by analysing and rearranging the data according to the relationships between the data items by knowing what data to collect and manage and in what context.
Why do companies or countries need business intelligence? A company's collected raw data is an important asset where one can find solutions to many of an organisation's critical questions like 'what was the net profit for a particular product last year and what will be sales this year and what are the key factors to be focused this year in order to increase the sales?'. So there arises a necessity of a well-planned intelligence system, which can lead to a greater profitability by reducing the operating costs, increasing the sales and thereby improving the customer satisfaction for an enterprise. With the help of a business intelligence system, a company may improve its business or rule over its competitors by exploring and exploiting its data to know the customer preferences, nature of customers, supply chains, geographical influences, pricing and how to increase its overall business efficiency.
Bangladesh possibly would never go for bribery, theft or blackmail, but it can easily acquire information from the open sources across the world. Let's look at a few examples where Bangladesh needs immediate attention.
Exporting labourers could be a prime wage earner activity for Bangladesh. Remittances by expatriate Bangladeshis are always praised in the media by all the governments. But do we know about the possible markets for our labourers? Does anyone in Bangladeshi missions do any research on this? Do we know who might be our possible competitors, say, in the Malaysian labour market?
Talking about Malaysia, the media back in Bangladesh comes to know first than our mission if any Bangladeshi workers are hiding in Malaysian forests to avoid detention. Is not it the responsibility of our mission to look after the state of the affairs in a certain country? Foreign embassies in Dhaka should provide perfect picture about how a mission should operate. Korean embassy, for example, in Dhaka has the information about each Korean residing in Bangladesh. Well, if you ask any one of our mission abroad about any information on Bangladeshis, they surely would be found to be at a loss.
Take Bangladeshi restaurant business in Britain as a test case. The new British immigration policy has restricted unskilled labourers to go there and work. The British Bangladeshis are talking to the government in UK about easing this law. No one from Bangladesh mission, for that matter, the foreign ministry, has taken any initiative for talking to the British government. As if it is the responsibility of the restaurant owners only. If our mission cannot talk to the British government, they can at least look for the sectors where Bangladeshi unskilled labourers could be accommodated in UK. Since restaurant business in UK has shown success, is it possible for Bangladeshi businessmen to dominate in the catering sector, is it possible to set up this business in other countries such as USA, Canada, Australia? Who would actually research on this? We don't have anyone or any organisation.
Bangladesh did run a few researches. I had once asked CPD (Centre for Policy Dialogue) for running a research whether Bangladesh's textiles sector is capable of feeding the readymade garments sector. CPD did that study and it was quite beneficial to the government.
Let's have a look at our neighbour India. Bangladesh seems an easy market for Indian products. When we become a foreign market, our own industry would never develop. Isn't it possible to watch Indian industries when they are coming up with new products? When India is launching a product, can we easily judge what it has in mind? Or do we want Bangladesh to be a perpetual market for Indian commodities?
Bangladesh does not have to go for hardcore espionage for this purpose. We need to engage methods of business intelligence for maximising profits for the country. This is simple. Engage the press attachés in Bangladesh missions abroad. They could easily monitor those countries' business news and send a weekly report back to Bangladesh about the state of their business and commerce, their needs. The reports would be researched by a cell back at home for finding out new markets, destinations for Bangladeshi products and labourers. For this purpose, a research cell could be set up by combining foreign, commerce, industries and finance ministries.
The prime objective of this cell would be to issue advisories to the respective decision-makers as a well as business houses in Bangladesh. A simple media monitoring in the countries where we have our mission would go a long way in achieving industrial espionage as well as business intelligence. It has been proven that countries that have media monitoring across the world do very well in international affairs as well as in business and commerce.
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