Dear BNET Reader,

Intelligence gathering isn't just for Cold War-era spies. You can use investigative research to find out what your competitors are up to -- and how it might affect your business. Here's our guide to competitive research with practical tools and techniques for corporate sleuthing.

Gather Competitive Research
To formulate an effective corporate strategy, it's essential to understand two basic questions: What is your company doing, and what are your competitors doing? Here's how to amass enough data to make meaningful comparisons.

Case Study: Bain Looks Inside a Japanese Automaker
BNET asked management consultancy Bain & Company to walk through a recent research assignment to learn how his team helped a client get the goods.

Keep Your Investigation Clean
Stay away from the legal and ethical ambigueties with this list of practices to avoid.

Where to Find the Data You Need
Here's a list of resources to the find financial, legal, IP, sales, and employee secrets.

What is Operations Research?
In a nutshell, it's the use of analytics to help you make better business decisions. Here's how it could be the key to beating your competitors.

The Salary Leak
The dilemma of the day: An employee stumbles upon a spreadsheet containing the salaries of everyone on staff and emails it around to several colleagues. Newly aware of significant pay discrepancies across departments, your staff is on the verge of mutiny. You're the CEO -- what do you do?

Word of the day: chainsaw consultant

JumpStart 2008 with Dell

Start the year right with unbelievable deals
on notebooks, desktops and accessories.
Get a Vostro 1400 notebook
with Intel Core(TM) 2 Duo,
2GB memory and 120GB hard drive for only $549

Click here for more information.

BNET Intercom
Advertising During a Recession

What should marketers in a flat lining economy do? It's clear that consumers are going to be watching their wallets a bit closer, and advertisers will have to try harder to pry pocketbooks back open in order to justify their budgets...

Business Hacks
Word Tip: Combine Multiple Documents

Need to combine multiple Word files into a single document? Sure, you could do a lot of cutting and pasting, but there's an easier way...

The View from Harvard Business
China and India: Billions of Entrepreneurs

With one-third of the world's population between them, China and India are quickly emerging as economic superpowers on the world stage. As a business person, how do you view this reality? Opportunity, or threat?...

More Daily Insights...

JumpStart 2008 with Dell. We make it easy to get the technology you need.