COMPETITIVE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY INTELLIGENCE

As industrial economies head irreversibly towards globalization, acces s to and applications of, new technological information from worldwide sources become critical. The National Research Council of Canada (NRC ) has carried out an experiment to determine whether researchers from a national scientific institution can make a contribution to accessing technological information from foreign sources, analyzing that inform ation, generating competitive intelligence and selectively disseminati ng that intelligence to Canadian firms. A trial copy of an S&T intelli gence bulletin was prepared by NRC in order to determine the essential features of a competitive S&T intelligence service. The intelligence in the bulletin was generated from information gathered from worldwide sources by NRC researchers in the course of their normal activities. The bulletin was sent to a small number of technology-intensive firms and the usefulness of the bulletin was evaluated by follow-up intervie ws. A description of the process of generation and dissemination of in telligence and the formal evaluation of that experiment is presented.