Towards the beginning of 2020, economies were severely disrupted by the covid-19 pandemic. Many businesses have been facing serious difficulties, going from a significant decrease in their revenues to the suspension of their activities. This crisis has, in fact, exposed the vulnerabilities of companies, and the limits of their traditional modes of governance focused mainly on adapting and reacting rather than anticipating.

This paper is a non-empirical article with the aim of outlining how companies can manage covid-19 costs by adopting competitive intelligence as a new mode of governance.

It shows that relaunching and maintaining a business in this new context relies mostly on mastering information and strategic knowledge. Therefore, companies are required to adopt a knowledge-based governance mode focused on competitive intelligence practices.