been uneven in competitive intelligence. Several academic journals, particularly the Journal of Competitive Intelligence and Management in its third volume, provided coverage of the field's global development. For example, in 1997 the (School of economic warfare) was founded in Paris, France. It is the first European institution which teaches the tactics of economic warfare within a globalizing world. In Germany, competitive intelligence was unattended until the early 1990s. The term "competitive intelligence" first appeared in German literature in 1997. In 1995, a German SCIP chapter was founded, which is now second in terms of membership in Europe. In 2004, the Institute for Competitive Intelligence was founded, which provides a postgraduate certification program for Competitive Intelligence Professionals. Japan is currently the only country that officially maintains an economic intelligence agency (JETRO). It was founded by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry in 1958. Accepting the importance of competitive intelligence, major multinational corporations, such as ExxonMobil, Procter & Gamble, and Johnson and Johnson, have created formal CI units. Organizations execute competitive intelligence activities not only as a safeguard to protect against market threats and changes, but also as a method for finding new opportunities and trends. Organizations use competitive intelligence to compare themselves to other organizations ("competitive benchmarking"), to identify risks and opportunities in their markets, and to pressure-test their plans against market response (business wargaming), which enable them to make informed decisions. One of the major activities involved in corporate competitive intelligence is use of ratio analysis, using key performance indicators (KPI). Organizations compare annual reports of their competitors on certain KPI and ratios, which are intrinsic to their industry. This helps them track their performance, vis-à-vis their competitors. The actual importance of these categories of information to an organization depends on the contestability of its markets, the organizational culture, the personality and biases of its top decision makers, and the reporting structure of competitive intelligence within the company. Strategic Intelligence (SI) focuses on the longer term, looking at issues affecting a company's competitiveness over the course of a couple of years. The actual time horizon for SI ultimately depends on the industry and how quickly it's changing. The general questions that SI answers are, ‘Where should we as a company be in X years?' and 'What are the strategic risks and opportunities facing us?' This type of intelligence work involves among others the identification of weak signals and application