Abstract

Business intelligence agencies. What are they in fact? How do they understand economic intelligence? What is business intelligence? And what is it not according to the research? Who is the customer? And who is the object? And what are they looking for? At first I did not set the hypotheses, because the main goal of the research is to immerse and understand the mechanisms of the community on the basis of a „clean card”, not verifying the assumptions of the researcher. Bauman and Pilch write „negligible value of research hypotheses particularly highlighted in the ethnographic research, in which assumptions not only restricts the field of research, but is considered to be harmful, because it creates a false picture of the test of reality”. Despite the fact that during the research, I set a list of questions, I quickly managed to create research categories, under which the data collected is grouped, enabling to develop unambiguous conclusions. In the article, an image of the business intelligence market is defined, as well as an attempt to answer the question what organisations offering services like „economic intelligence” actually do, and what to look for when involving a detective.

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