Management in Practice Ethical Dilemna

This case study concerns the new product manager Miguel Vasquez for a biotechnology start-up company, who was handed a stack of private strategic documents from the company’s closest competitor. The documents were a “competitive intelligence gold mine” and included pricing strategies, partnership agreements and product plans. The documents however were marked “proprietary and confidential” and were taken of the competing firm’s server.

Miguel being a new manager is placed in a tight situation and even though he personally did not seem to be comfortable with using the documents to gain a competitive advantage, these documents were handed down to him by his boss and had found no company policies or regulations that offered any guidance in the matter.

I would therefore advise Miguel to start by contacting the relevant parties regarding issues like this and collect information that his able to take to his boss and make a reasonable argument about the negative aspects and penalties regarding the use of this information.

According to the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, and the code of ethics provided by them for competitive intelligence, a company is not able to gather information that has been clearly designated as confidential, even if the information was collected inadvertently. The code of ethics also clearly states that all requests for confidentiality of information are to be fully respected and are therefore binding.

Also the use of these documents could result in the company being persecuted for corporate espionage. Under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 which was enacted to protect proprietary economic information, the documents in this case can be considered a trade secret and so therefore are protected making the use and theft of them a federal crime.

For example in the case of United States v Lange(), The Economic Espionage Act was used to protect a victim company that had learned that Lange