ABSTRACT
Competitive analysis would be a lot easier and far more reliable if the information that served as its raw material were of a uniformly high quality. This chapter outlines a two-stage scheme for judging the reliability of a piece of information: What kind of data is an analyst dealing with; where do they come from. It warns analysts to beware the pernicious analytical menaces of misinformation, disinformation and source contamination. Source criticism developed in German universities in the nineteenth century as a way of furthering a profounder study of the Bible and the classical texts surviving from ancient Greece and Rome. In many ways misinformation is more dangerous in competitive intelligence (CI) analysis than denial and deception. In principle information supplied from several sources is more trustworthy than that derived from a single one. Corporate misinformation and disinformation, together with the disturbing possibility of source contamination, hold special dangers and the analyst has to be on the alert for them.
