How to Vet a Corporate Intelligence Vendor

Four questions to help ensure a prospective partner aligns with your company’s needs, risk tolerance, and ethics.

January 19, 2024

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Demand for intelligence vendors is substantial and increasing. In 2022, global cyber threat intelligence was estimated to be a $4.93 billion industry, and U.S. security services was a whopping $48.1 billion. Geopolitical and security risk intelligence is an unquantified but essential and rapidly growing part of the story. But how do you know whether an intelligence vendor aligns with your company’s needs, risk tolerance, and ethics? The authors, from Harvard University’s Belfer Center’s Intelligence Project, have developed a database of 70 vendors that corporate intelligence professionals identified as informing their work. Their systematic analysis of this dynamic ecosystem revealed four key questions for corporate decision makers to ask in order to maximize their return on vendors.

Imagine you’re the CEO of a major technology firm and your chief operations officer is conducting a site visit in Asia to scope out a potential new investment. Your company needs: 1) an on-the-ground security provider to protect your COO during the trip, 2) an assessment of the country, including security and geopolitical conditions that could facilitate or jeopardize business, and 3) better understanding of your potential partners.

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Maria Robson-Morrow manages the Intelligence Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She holds a PhD from Northeastern University, where her dissertation research focused on private-sector intelligence. She previously worked as a security intelligence analyst in the Canadian energy industry.

Katherine Tucker is a PhD candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School and a research assistant at the Intelligence Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Her dissertation research focuses on the intelligence community and terrorism.

Paul R. Kolbe is the former director of the Intelligence Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Kolbe previously led BP’s Global Intelligence team supporting threat warning, risk mitigation, and crisis response. Kolbe served 25 years as an officer and executive in the CIA’s Operations Directorate.