Commercial Intelligence is the highest and most comprehensive form of legal, ethical open source intelligence

Open source intelligence

Open-source intelligence is a form of intelligence collection management that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence...

 as practiced by diverse international and localized businesses.

Competitive intelligence

Competitive intelligence

A broad definition of competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.Key...

 focuses primarily on competitors and their capabilities within shared market spaces.

Business intelligence

Business intelligence

Business intelligence mainly refers to computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes....

 is a mis-nomer for data mining

Data mining

Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...

 and enterprise dashboards that present useful patterns or distillations of internal information to the executive.

The most prominent professional association associated with commercial or competitive intelligence is the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals

Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals

The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals - is a global nonprofit membership organization designed to enhance the skills of knowledge professionals in order to help their companies...

 (SCIP) based in Alexandria, Virginia

Alexandria, Virginia

Alexandria is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia. As of 2009, the city had a total population of 139,966. Located along the Western bank of the Potomac River, Alexandria is approximately six miles south of downtown Washington, D.C.Like the rest of northern Virginia, as well as...

. Many countries around the world either host chapters of SCIP, or have their own indigenous commercial intelligence association.