Book excerpt: The textbook at hand aims to provide an introduction to the use of automated methods for gathering strategic competitive intelligence. Hereby, the text does not describe a singleton research discipline in its own right, such as machine learning or Web mining. It rather contemplates an application scenario, namely the gathering of knowledge that appears of paramount importance to organizations, e.g., companies and corporations. To this end, the book first summarizes the range of research disciplines that contribute to addressing the issue, extracting from each those grains that are of utmost relevance to the depicted application scope. Moreover, the book presents systems that put these techniques to practical use (e.g., reputation monitoring platforms) and takes an inductive approach to define the gestalt of mining for competitive strategic intelligence by selecting major use cases that are laid out and explained in detail. These pieces form the first part of the book. Each of those use cases is backed by a number of research papers, some of which are contained in its largely original version in the second part of the monograph.