Although this seems a straightforward question, different people use the terms in different ways. Our definition follows:

• Competitive Intelligence is the process whereby information on the competitive environment guides and informs the company's decisions. Competitive Intelligence looks at the overall external competitive environment (which includes suppliers, customers, and other company stakeholders, as well as the economic, sociocultural, political, legal and technological environment facing the company).
• Competitor intelligence is a subset of this – looking purely at competitors, rather than the overall competitive environment (which include customers, suppliers, regulators, etc.).
• Business intelligence is the widest of the three terms, encompassing the internal business systems within the company.

For other people, competitor and competitive intelligence are effectively synonymous. They use terms such as marketing intelligence and business intelligence to cover the wider environmental aspects.

To add to the confusion, business intelligence now frequently defines the data-mining processes companies use to analyse their internal information. You will also frequently encounter other related terms – sales intelligence, technological intelligence, financial intelligence and economic intelligence. Essentially these are further sub-divisions, limiting information to decision processes relating to sales, technology, financial or economic business functions.

They say that the Inuit (Eskimo) have hundreds of words for different types of snow, while Arabic has numerous words for different types of camel. I wonder if this subdivision of types of "intelligence" is a similar example of refining terms to a level where the differences are essentially trivial except to the experts and just confuse everybody else.

Note: This FAQ was originally published in the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professional's membership magazine (Competitive Intelligence Magazine - Mar-Apr 2003)