Job postings and team changes
New roles, locations and skills show what a company is building and where.
OSINT Business Intelligence and Competitive Intelligence
OSINT business intelligence turns what competitors, partners and markets publish about themselves into answers your strategy team can use. Job ads, tender awards, patent filings, registry changes and permits show where a company is heading months before a press release does.
- Market entry and landscape briefs
- Competitor moves and capabilities
- Partner and target screening
- Lawful sources, no misrepresentation
Short answer
OSINT business intelligence is the analysis of public information about markets and companies, such as registries, job postings, public tenders, patents, regulatory filings, trade data and media, to support commercial decisions. It shows who the players are, what competitors are building and who is worth partnering with or buying. OSINT-S does it without pretexting or trade secrets, and sources every finding.
Business Questions OSINT Can Answer
Competitive intelligence is useful when it is tied to a decision. Most projects start from one of four.
| Decision | Typical question | Where the answer usually sits |
|---|---|---|
| Enter a new market | Who already sells here, who owns them, and who regulates the sector? | Registries, licensing bodies, tender databases, trade press |
| Respond to a competitor | Is the rival building a new product line or moving into our region? | Job postings, patent applications, permits, new subsidiaries |
| Choose a partner or distributor | Which candidates are solid, and which have conflicts or a poor record? | Company records, litigation, customers named in tenders, media |
| Screen an acquisition target | Is the target's story about customers, growth and technology credible? | Procurement awards, patents, hiring trends, filings, archived websites |
We push for the decision at scoping. "Tell us everything about Competitor X" produces a thick file nobody reads; "Will Competitor X bid for public contracts in our region next year?" produces an answer.
Signals We Read in OSINT Business Intelligence
No single signal is conclusive. Combined, hiring, procurement, patents, filings and permits give a reliable view of what a company is doing.
Public tenders and awards
Who bids, who wins, at what scale and with which partners, from national and supranational procurement portals.
Patent applications
Technical direction and co-applicants, read with the publication delay in mind.
Registry filings
New subsidiaries, joint ventures, changes of officers, charges and capital increases in each country.
Permits and sites
Planning applications, environmental permits and import records that reveal a new plant, warehouse or supply route.
Statements and footprint
Conference talks, product documentation, website changes, regulatory submissions and trade press interviews.
Brand protection →How Early Each Competitor Signal Appears
Different signals arrive at different times. Reading them together, with their delays in mind, is what turns data into foresight.
| Signal | What it shows | Timing caveat |
|---|---|---|
| Job postings | Capabilities being built now | Often the earliest signal; ads can be speculative or reused |
| Registry filings | New entities, partners, capital | Filed after the decision, sometimes with a statutory delay |
| Permits and planning | Physical expansion | Usually months ahead of operation; may never be built |
| Tender awards | Customers and contract values | Published after award; shows the past year's wins |
| Patent applications | Research direction | US applications are generally published promptly after 18 months from the earliest filing date, and applicants who do not file abroad can ask for nonpublication (35 U.S.C. §122) |
A patent shows where a competitor was heading a year and a half ago; a hiring spike shows where it is heading now. The useful analysis is where they agree.
Market Entry and Landscape Briefs
A market entry brief maps the players, owners, regulators and routes to market in a country you are about to enter, so you plan with facts, not assumptions.
Before entering a new country, companies usually need the same answers: who the established competitors are and who owns them, which distributors serve the sector, how public contracts are awarded and to whom, which licenses are required, and which players have politically exposed owners. Registries, licensing bodies, tender portals and trade press cover most of it.
When the political environment itself is the question, the brief connects to geopolitical risk intelligence. When a shortlist of partners emerges, the strongest candidates move into due diligence before contracts are drafted.
Partner and Target Screening With OSINT
Screening a long list of partners or targets with OSINT narrows it to the few worth meeting, and flags problems before they cost a negotiation.
Corporate development teams often start with twenty names and the time to meet five. A screening pass checks each candidate's ownership, size, public customers, litigation, technology and reputation, and ranks them against your criteria. The deeper ownership questions for the shortlist belong to company investigations.
The same method supports acquisition work: whether the target's named clients appear in procurement records, whether its engineering team matches the technology it claims, and whether public reviews by former staff and customers describe the business the way the deck does.
Ethics and Law: No Misrepresentation, No Trade Secrets
We collect only what is lawfully public. We do not misrepresent who we are, induce anyone to breach confidentiality or handle trade secrets.
- United States. The Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 gives trade secret owners a federal civil action, with exemplary damages of up to twice the award for willful and malicious misappropriation (18 U.S.C. §1836). "Improper means" include theft, bribery, misrepresentation and breach or inducement of a breach of a duty to maintain secrecy, but not reverse engineering, independent derivation or other lawful means (18 U.S.C. §1839). Under the Economic Espionage Act, theft of trade secrets can mean up to 10 years in prison, and organizations face fines of up to the greater of $5 million or three times the value of the stolen secret (18 U.S.C. §1832).
- European Union. Directive (EU) 2016/943, which member states had to transpose by 9 June 2018, treats independent discovery and the observation, study, disassembly or testing of a product made available to the public as lawful acquisition, and unauthorized access to or copying of documents and files under the holder's control as unlawful (EUR-Lex).
- Professional standard. The SCIP code of ethics for intelligence professionals requires compliance with all applicable laws and accurate disclosure of one's identity and organization before any interview (SCIP).
In practice: no pretext calls or fake recruiter approaches, no fake profiles to join closed groups, no hacking, no leaked or stolen documents, and no debriefing of a competitor's current or former staff about confidential matters. Personal data, for example in employee profiles, is used in aggregate and in proportion, in line with the GDPR and UK GDPR (GDPR).
How a Competitive Intelligence Project Runs
Five steps, from a decision-focused question to a reviewed brief, with an option to keep watching afterwards.
- Frame the decisionYou tell us what you are deciding and when. We turn it into a few answerable questions and a fixed quote.
- Choose the signalsWe pick the sources that answer those questions in the countries that matter: registries, tenders, patents, jobs, permits, media.
- Collect and normalizeRecords are gathered, deduplicated and dated, so trends over time are visible.
- Analyze and testPatterns are checked against independent sources, and alternative explanations are recorded.
- Brief and reviewA senior analyst reviews the conclusions and confidence levels before the brief reaches you.
Briefs, Profiles and Ongoing Watch
One-off briefs take from 10 business days to about a month. Competitors you need to follow continuously can be tracked on an hourly-updated, analyst-reviewed platform.
- Decision brief. The answer to your question on the first page, with the evidence and our confidence behind it.
- Competitor or partner profiles. Ownership, footprint, customers, technology and recent moves, in a consistent format you can compare.
- Source annex. Every record with its link and the date it was observed.
A focused brief takes from 10 business days; a multi-country landscape up to about a month. Urgent work costs 50% more, and if we miss the agreed date, the fee goes down. Work is confidential, under NDA if you need one. For a continuing watch on named competitors, OSINT monitoring tracks filings, tenders, hiring and media. Teams that want to build this skill in-house can use OSINT training.
When OSINT Business Intelligence Is the Wrong Tool
Open sources show what companies do in public. They will not replace customer research, market sizing panels or confidential data.
If you need to know what customers think, commission surveys or interviews conducted openly. If you need precise market share, syndicated industry data is often better. If the answer only exists in a competitor's private pricing sheets or board papers, we will not obtain it, and we will tell you so at scoping rather than return a guess.
Business intelligence also works best alongside the rest of our OSINT services for strategy and deal teams: a landscape brief often feeds a partner shortlist, and a shortlist feeds due diligence.
Bring Us the Decision, Not Just the Competitor's Name
Tell us what you are deciding, which companies and countries matter and your deadline. We reply with the questions we would answer, a delivery date and a fixed quote.
OSINT Business Intelligence FAQ
We're a mid-sized manufacturer and a competitor seems to be preparing a move into our region — can OSINT business intelligence tell us what they're planning before they announce it?
Often it can show the direction. We look at their job postings by role and location, new subsidiaries or branch registrations, permits for sites, distributor agreements visible in trade press, and tenders they bid on. Together these usually show whether a move is real, its likely scale and timing. We report it as a likelihood with the evidence, not as certainty.
Our company is considering entering a new country next year and the board wants a landscape of local competitors, their owners and how public contracts are awarded — how long would that take?
A focused brief on one country typically takes from 10 business days, and a multi-country landscape up to about a month. It covers the main competitors and their owners, distributors, licensing requirements, recent public contract awards and winners, and players with political exposure. Candidates you want to partner with can then go into due diligence.
Can you find out our competitor's pricing and margins by having someone call their sales team posing as a potential customer?
No. Posing as a customer to extract information is misrepresentation, and we do not do it. We can analyze prices a competitor publishes, prices disclosed in public tender awards, and what their filings reveal about revenue and margins. If the answer only exists in confidential documents, we tell you that at scoping.
We just hired an engineer who used to work at our main rival — is it okay for your team to interview him about their product roadmap as part of a competitive intelligence project?
We would not. A former employee usually owes a duty of confidentiality to the previous employer, and asking about a roadmap risks trade secret misappropriation claims for you and him. Talk to your counsel about what he may share. Our work relies on public sources such as patents, job ads, filings and published statements.
I run corporate development at a software company and have a list of twenty possible acquisition targets — can you screen them quickly and tell us which five deserve a meeting?
Yes. A screening pass checks each target's ownership, hiring trends, customers named in public sources, product footprint, litigation and reputation against criteria you set, then ranks them with short reasons. The shortlist can go straight into deeper company investigations or due diligence once talks begin.
We see a rival's patent applications appear months after the fact — is patent monitoring still worth it for competitive intelligence, or are we always too late?
It is still worth it, for the right question. US applications generally publish after 18 months, so patents show research direction and co-applicants rather than next quarter's launch. Pair them with hiring data and conference talks, which move faster, and the combination shows which research is turning into product.
Our team is in the EU — is OSINT business intelligence legal if it involves collecting public profiles of a competitor's employees to understand their team structure?
It can be, with care. Public professional profiles are personal data under the GDPR, so the collection needs a legitimate purpose, should be limited to what the question needs, and is best reported in aggregate, for example team sizes and skills by location, rather than as dossiers on individuals. We do not join closed groups or use fake profiles.
Sources and Notes
- 18 U.S.C. §1836: civil proceedings (Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016)
- 18 U.S.C. §1839: definitions, including improper means
- 18 U.S.C. §1832: theft of trade secrets (Economic Espionage Act)
- Directive (EU) 2016/943 on the protection of trade secrets, EUR-Lex
- SCIP: Code of Ethics
- 35 U.S.C. §122: confidential status of applications; publication
- Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR)
Sources checked 7 October 2026. Figures about third-party firms and tools are as published by them or by the cited source on that date.