ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE. IN SEARCH OF A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK.

In the last decade, we have witnessed a significant shift in the way local, regional, or global confrontations are performed with specific roles being attributed to the economic intelligence systems. By executing intelligence and counterintelligence operations, the economic intelligence systems are operating in confluence areas bringing together intelligence communities, governmental and diplomacy apparatus, and the business actors. Also, recently, revamped forms of warfare have illustrated how economic leverage is frequently used in combined and versatile hybrid interventions against democratic state stability and legitimacy. Despite this intense employment of economic advantage, economic intelligence represents one of the concepts that is still looking for conceptual clarity as it is frequently used in conjunction with other proxy terms (i.e., business intelligence, industrial espionage, competitive intelligence, economic security, and economic espionage), while its meaning ascribed in different contexts is rarely explicit. Starting from the premise that when lacking clarification, concepts become broad, ambiguous, and difficult to apply, the paper aims to bring forward conceptual clarifications by exploring and comparing various definitions existing in the literature while seeking to advance an operational definition for economic intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]