Sustainable competitive advantage in medical tourism businesses

The paper seeks to explore the relationships between competitive intelligence and sustainable competitive advantage. In total, ۱۰۰ executives were surveyed about their companies’ usage of competitive intelligence (including marketing intelligence, technology intelligence and competitor intelligence) and also their sustainable competitive advantages. The research identified marketing intelligence is as an important influencing factor in business sustainable competitive advantage. The findings show that marketing intelligence was the most important predictor among all other of the antecedents of business sustainable competitive advantage. Because the data were limited to medical tourism, future studies need to validate these findings in other industries. Findings of this study suggest that to increase competitive advantage, it is critical for medical tourism businesses to invest in developing and enhancing marketing intelligence. This paper contributes to the literature on this area of research. One of the nnovations introduced here was the design of conceptual model integrating competitive intelligence components and, to examine their impacts on competitive advantage.

Keywords:

Competitive Intelligence , Sustainable Competitive Advantage , Medical tourism.