The commercial sector has its own intelligence requirements that encompass many of these issues, but there’s a different approach in commercial intelligence pursuit, pointed out Bob Gourley, founder and partner, OODA LLC. Where the national intelligence community focuses on understanding hostile adversaries and foreign powers and their related issues, the needs of corporate America are much broader. The commercial sector has a different customer set with different analytic tradecraft required, he observed. “I’d like to see more training of the analytical tradecraft from the intelligence community into corporate America, but I’d like to see it in a way that scales.” This effort should begin in the earliest levels of schools with education in critical thinking across all of the nation, he added.
Then there is the flow of analytic techniques from the corporate sector into the intelligence community. Gourley lauded intelligence officials who have asked the commercial sector how it does analysis, as lessons learned there could be applied in this new intelligence era.