Identification of trend patterns related to the dynamics of competitive intelligence budgets : the case of Romanian software industry

Our paper examines the challenging task of analysing the dynamics of Competitive Intelligence (CI) budgets within the Romanian software companies. The paper doesn’t seek to find the optimal pattern of allocating CI budgets from the business turnover, as every organization involved in software development has different goals and requirements for CI measurement. The aim is to transpose the CI budgets dynamics in different types of trends (linear, quadratic and exponential) using the coefficient of variation method and to analyse the Romanian managers decision making processes related to CI budgets allocation, by taking into account the peculiarities of four software companies clusters: start-ups, expert-coders, utility-developers and stars. -- competitive intelligence ; software industry ; cluster ; trend patterns ; coefficient of variation