Course syllabus

[Mark Johnson]

I have been approached to create and teach a university-level CI Virtual/Online Course.  Am interested in ideas from folks about existing syllabi, resources, approaches.  I've seen syllabi before from some of the notable academic CI folks.  

I have some ideas about projects, writing assignments, tools/techniques/sources, etc.  But I would be interested in suggestions from the community.  

[Arthur Weiss]

One idea that could form part of the CI assessment would be to produce a case study looking at a particular company and how CI has helped or failed to influence strategy, and why. Such work would be a good test of candidate's analysis skills - and also require them to show evidence by collecting intelligence to support their work. In addition, if enough good case studies were written, they could then be collected together to produce a volume of CI case studies that could be submitted to the Case Study clearing house. (http://www.ecch.com/). This would then be useful for further CI teaching as top level case studies could then be used by others. 

A key aspect would be that this would not have to be a practitioner case study (and probably shouldn't be - as these risk becoming studies in how a particular company employing the candidate does their CI). The aim would be to look at companies that had succeeded where evidence was that their success was due to an in depth understanding of their competitive position or vice versa. (There are lots of companies that could be considered. Immediate ones coming to mind are Polaroid prior to his bankruptcy around 10 years ago, Kodak, Fuji, Apple, EMI, Borders Books, etc.). 

[klaus Söilen]

Hi Mark!

When I was teaching the course Business Intelligence at BTH in Sweden, from 2002-20010, I used the Syllabus you find attached here. I also taught BI and CI components in other courses at the school, for the engineers. Later on my own course also  became more technical. It then basically had three components; one part business, one part geopolitics or geoeconomics, and one part information systems.

The last time I taught the course at BTH (2010) the books/reading material used were:

1. Solberg Söilen, K. (2005). Introduction to priate and public intelligence. Studentlitteratur: Lund. 

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Private-Public-Intelligence-Comp...

2. Jenster, P, Solberg Söilen, K.(2009). Market Intelligence. Building Strategic Insight. CBS Press: Copenhagen.

http://www.amazon.com/Market-Intelligence-Building-Strategic-Insigh...

3. Solberg Söilen, K. (2010). The era of Geoeconomics. Compendium. 

4. Turban, E et al (2010). Decision Support and Business Intelligence Systems. Pearson 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Decision-Support-Business-Intelligence-Syst...

I have had many years experience teaching online. I think we were one of the first universities to start with videolectures, back in 2003-4, using a system called Marratech (Swedish made) later bought by Microsoft. To me the difference between using video and not is substantial and I always recommend it. It takes a while to get used to, but the rewards are much higher. At BTH we later changed to ACP for video, and at Halmstad University where I am now we use Blackboard, which I think is better. Others have had much positive to say about Microsoft's package solution for videolectures. 

Hope that helps some :-)

Best, from Chengdu, China

Klaus

[Rainer Michaeli]

Hi Mark:

Check out the "Body of Knowledge for Competitive Intelligence" e.g. here: http://www.institute-for-competitive-intelligence.com/body-of-knowl...

One of the reason it was developed was the development of coursework for colleges and universities.

To make my university courses more lively (and hands-on) I usually invite practictioners in line with the main case study/topic of the agenda. 

As an alternative to guest stars, you might want to consider using video clips of competitive intelligence conference presentations: http://www.institute-for-competitive-intelligence.com/channel-ici-c...

Hope this helps