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Rating: 
Summary: Best book on the market for technical business intelligence
Review: Dick is a genius, and he and Bradford Ashton have pulled together a number of very fine contributions in this book. Still, they sum it up nicely in the concluding chapter: "The formal practice of developing technical intelligence in American business is only in its infancy." They have a nice appendix of sources on scientific and technical intelligence that is missing a few big obvious sources like the Canadian Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) and the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) as well as the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) and several smaller sources. On balance, this technical intelligence community is, as Bradford notes, in its infancy. It is U.S. centric, does not yet understand operational security and counterintelligence, is weak of cost intelligence, relies too heavily on registered patents, and has too few practical successes stories. Especially troubling is the recent trend within DIA and the Air Force of cutting off all funding for open source exploitation of Chinese and other foreign S&T sources, combined with a dismantling by many corporations of their libraries and most basic market research functions. This book is an essential reference and I admire its authors greatly-sadly, they are part of a small minority that has not yet found its full voice.
Rating:
Summary: Best book on the market for technical business intelligence
Review: Dick is a genius, and he and Bradford Ashton have pulled together a number of very fine contributions in this book. Still, they sum it up nicely in the concluding chapter: "The formal practice of developing technical intelligence in American business is only in its infancy." They have a nice appendix of sources on scientific and technical intelligence that is missing a few big obvious sources like the Canadian Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) and the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) as well as the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) and several smaller sources. On balance, this technical intelligence community is, as Bradford notes, in its infancy. It is U.S. centric, does not yet understand operational security and counterintelligence, is weak of cost intelligence, relies too heavily on registered patents, and has too few practical successes stories. Especially troubling is the recent trend within DIA and the Air Force of cutting off all funding for open source exploitation of Chinese and other foreign S&T sources, combined with a dismantling by many corporations of their libraries and most basic market research functions. This book is an essential reference and I admire its authors greatly-sadly, they are part of a small minority that has not yet found its full voice.
Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive and insightful
Review: This is among the most comprehensive, insightful and balanced books on CI that I have read. Although there is very little on the topic of CI in the scientic and technical communities, which the books editors accurately note, this book goes a long way to estabishing the basis for the field. Among the things I like best in the book are: 1) the balance between the conceptual and the applied - both the theory and the management applications are covered, 2) The introduction to TI by the editors does a better-than-average job of setting up the field, and 3) the chapters by Herring on creating successful S&T Intelligence Programs, Tibbetts on technology scouting, and the future direction chapter by Ashton are among the best of their kind in the literature. The things I liked less about the book (and there aren't many mate) include a bit too much introduction or overview material to basic CI in several of the chapters (the editors would have been helpful had they removed this overlap), and several of the chapters read far more like research studies and are too narrowly focussed to allow for much use(ex: Klavans chapter on research underlying TI, Penens' chapter on standards). In sum, this book is clearly the best out there on technical intelligence for business. If this area is important to you, you will find value in many facets of this book. Being that the book was published in 1997, I hope that these authors will consider doing a follow-up so that we can see the field's development through the advances in the computer-mediated economy, globalization and evolving competition in S&T space.
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