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7038812 
Journal Article 
COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE IN THE DIGITAL AGE: NEUROTECHNOLOGIES FOR HUMAN COGNITIVE AUGMENTATION 
Dinu, DG; Stoian-Karadeli, A; , 
2019 
EUROMED PRESS 
MARSEILLE CEDEX 9 
1619-1621 
The early period of Competitive Intelligence - the 80's - was the pre-internet period and was characterized mostly by analogue systems. Most of the data and information were gathered from primary sources. The data and information that were collected from secondary sources needed the intervention of the human factor to process, analyse and extract meaning from them. As technology evolved, most of today's data and information is generated and stored in digital format - this period known as Digital Age. Digitizedion is a process that generates a huge amount of data that cannot be analysed in real-time by human users. This context has led to the accelerated development of solutions that process and analyses a huge volume of data that bears the generic name of "cognitive solutions". ' Cognitization' was a logical step in the digitization advancement and expansion of gobbling. IBM's Cognitive Business (IBM, 2015), as an application of the Watson platform, revolutionizes how to obtain, analyse, store and use digital information for economic and financial decisions. The Microsoft Brainwave (Microsoft, 2017) project promises access to real-time artificial intelligence (AI) services, especially in the financial and research environment. Immersive cognitive systems allow corporations to lead from a veritable "cockpit" or "bridge" with situational assessment rooms, cognitive boardrooms, immersive classes etc. in which human staff will constantly interact with artificial cognitive agents. For smaller businesses (national, regional), it is estimated that in the coming years, access to AI services over the internet (InternetDeliver AI) will be the standard for the civil business domain (Mary, 2015).In the field of Competitive Intelligence, the goal of practitioners is to collect data and information that they process and analyse, then transform them into intelligence suggesting actions, strategies or decisions. To respond rapidly to the urgent need to collect relevant data and information from an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment, as characterized by the current economy, Competitive Intelligence practitioners need to build fast and efficient work systems such as those described above. At the same time, they need to develop new skills, such as agility and attention. Attention is a mandatory condition for Competitive Intelligence practitioners while agility often depends on the ability to maintain a high level of attention (focus) and at the same time the rapid response to the stimulus (alertness). The ability of analysts to remain focused on a particular goal is what ensures their success or failure.For the Intelligence Competitive practitioner to remain relevant, efficient and to keep up with an environment that contains a large volume of information, while the field of Artificial Intelligence develops, it needs to enhance his cognitive abilities through optimization, stimulation and augmentation. Among these three methods, the one that represents the subject of this paper is augmentation.Augmentation implies enhancing the cognitive abilities within while optimizing and stimulating the factors of intervention. For optimization, intervention can be done through pharmacological means such as nootropic drugs or smart drugs. Stimulation can be obtained through neuro-technology: electrical and magnetic transcranial stimulation (Wingeier, 2017). Another way to classify brain stimulation methods is to divide them into two broad categories: invasive methods and non- invasive methods. Invasive methods involve direct brain intervention such as Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) and have been used for learning enhancement (Clark & Parasuraman, 2014; Suthana & Fried, 2014). The most popular non-invasive brain-stimulation technologies are transcranial electrical stimulation (TES), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and focused ultrasound (FUS). While the three of them - optimization, stimulation, augmentation - are means of brain enhancement, augmentation is non-invasive, risk- free and it is the only one that is based on neuroplasticity - which means the ability of the brain to learn new things. Much recent research (Edmonds & Tenenbaum, 2012) has led to amazing understandings about the relationship between pleasure, learning and motivation in the brain. It is now known that there is a centre of pleasure in the medial part of the prefrontal cortex, right in the middle of the forehead, a part that is involved in the process of focus attention, alertness, learning and that motivates us to go forward.Pleasure and happiness are the basic motivators for our lives. We want to expand happiness and pleasure develops momentum. We learn to associate many types of events with these feelings. Living in a sense of happiness, we change our vision of life, the reaction to events and situations, our memory, our learning and our general well-being. When we are happy, we connect much more easily to others. As we know, the maintenance of positive emotions stimulates health while maintenance of the negative benefits of the disease.Mental training is based on biofeedback - it is a method that uses the mind to control a function of the body that is normally regulated automatically, such as body temperature, heart rate, happiness and pleasure etc. to increase the production of high-frequency (gamma) brainwaves from the medial part of the prefrontal cortex. In short, people can teach their brains how to raise their attention, alertness happiness and other positive feelings that are associated with the production of chemicals (endorphins and dopamine). Based on a device that measures the frequency of brain waves and software that interprets this information, we can tell when the brain (based on the fact that certain activities and certain states are associated with certain types of waves) is concentrated when it secretes dopamine when it is happy and other. This type of training is called neuro-feedback.Advances in neuroscience and the development of neuro-technologies have progressively raised new and unique ethical issues ("neuroethics"), in addition to the more traditional aspects related to human participation in research studies.The most important ethical issues are related to: Mind Reading and Privacy; Agency, Responsibility and Liability; Safety and Invasiveness of Brain Enhancement, Society 
Vrontis, D; Weber, Y; Tsoukatos, E; 
12th Annual Conference of the EuroMed-Academy-of-Business 
Thessaloniki, GREECE