Dear friends, prospects and alumni of the ICI:

Six years ago ICI held its first open workshops with four scheduled events running between June and November 2004. To date ICI has successfully hosted 160 open workshops across 9 countries on 3 continents.

The Competitive Intelligence world and the Institute have developed dramatically in the course of these last six years, but the core mission and values on which ICI was founded have remained constant. We continue to be leading independent global professional educator in Competitive Intelligence helping our students to achieve excellence in Competitive Intelligence thinking and practice and consequently advancing their business careers.

These principles have enabled ICI’s entrepreneurial spirit to evolve and the school has grown into a truly global force. We are proud that the ICI remains the only institution that offers a certification program, the CPCI™, that comprehensively covers the competencies identified by the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) Body of Knowledge (BOK) education programme.

I’m excited that our next ICI conference will enable us to bridge academic research and hands-on, down to earth reality of CI beginners and professionals alike. By teaming up with ATELIS (France), we’ll be able to provide an international conference in April 2011 that will be second to none. A call for speakers has just been published, a committee of 33 high calibre CI professionals will review submissions and support the design of a can’t-afford-to-be-missed conference. Save the date April 6-7th 2011 to your calendars now! 

For me, as Director of the Institute, our recent internationalization provides huge excitement. Now with representation in the USA, UK, Spain/Portugal, France and the GCC-countries the ICI can serve more clients with a local presence - especially for in-house workshops. And indeed our educational de-facto standard has as a consequence spread further around the world.

In the second half of 2010 the Institute will run workshops in the US (September), France (October), Germany (October) and the UK (November) – we are looking forward to greeting you as one of our participants!

With kind regards

Rainer Michaeli
Director

Institute for Competitive Intelligence (ICI)