Abstract
As industrial economies head irreversibly towards globalization, access to and applications of, new technological information from worldwide sources become critical. The National Research Council of Canada (NRC) has carried out an experiment to determine whether researchers from a national scientific institution can make a contribution to accessing technological information from foreign sources, analyzing that information, generating competitive intelligence and selectively disseminating that intelligence to Canadian firms. A trial copy of an Science and Technology (S&T) intelligence bulletin was prepared by NRC in order to determine the essential features of a competitive S&T intelligence service. The intelligence in the bulletin was generated from information gathered from worldwide sources by NRC researchers in the course of their normal activities. The bulletin was sent to a small number of technology-intensive firms and the usefulness of the bulletin was evaluated by follow-up interviews. A description of the process of generation and dissemination of intelligence and the formal evaluation of that experiment is presented.