Competitive intelligence in the start-up companies belonging to the ICT sector in Tunisia

Abstract

The objective of this work is double. On the one hand, it aims at diagnosing the practices of environmental scanning in the start-up companies belonging to the ICT sector in Tunisia, and on the other hand, it aims at counting their real needs in information. Based on questionnaires and interviews, our results show that in spite of the awareness of the importance of competitive intelligence, the latter suffers from several cultural weaknesses (weak information sharing) and material weaknesses (financial and logistic). Our results, particularly demonstrate the pre-eminence of the informal sources of information collection and sharing and the urgent need for the technological scanning, the tenders’ scanning the event scanning. The competitive intelligence remains a recent, poorly developed, and poorly structured, poorly formalized and poorly effective practice. It does not appear among the priorities of the young Tunisian entrepreneurs who grant it a little time.