Towards an anticipatory system incorporating corporate foresight and competitive intelligence in creating knowledge: a longitudinal Moroccan bank case study

Since banks are competing in challenging and dynamic market environments, an anticipatory system generating futures-relevant knowledge is of primordial importance for an effective bank strategy. The objective of this research is to investigate how corporate foresight and competitive intelligence, considered as parts of an anticipatory system, create knowledge. Our main contribution lies in arriving at a better understanding of these processes in the mainstream of knowledge creation grounded in the SECI model. To this end, we followed a longitudinal case-study methodology for more than eight months within a leading bank in Morocco. The findings show that while the competitive intelligence unit focuses more on commercial and competitor intelligence targeting hence other banks market strategies, the corporate foresight unit tries to identify the bank market weak signals and major trends in the banking sector. Knowledge creation is mainly triggered in the social interaction context in the competitive intelligence unit, while the externalization phase involving interacting Bas is critical to knowledge creation in the corporate foresight unit. The results also confirm the presence of a black hole strategy problem and a lack of coordination between competitive intelligence and corporate foresight processes, thus highlighting the need for dynamic integrated anticipatory systems.