GEOPOLITICS23 August 2026· 16 min

Defensive Economic Intelligence: Protecting Strategic Assets in 2024

As economic espionage costs exceed $600B annually, organizations must deploy structured defensive intelligence frameworks. This premium guide delivers a reproducible 5-layer methodology, three measured case studies, and prioritized countermeasures drawn from declassified intelligence doctrine.

InekIA Editorial Team

LI X

Executive Summary

Economic espionage is no longer an abstract geopolitical concern — it is a quantifiable operational threat eroding competitive advantage at scale. The FBI estimates that trade secret theft alone costs the U.S. economy between $180 billion and $540 billion per year, while the broader OECD calculates that IP theft across member states exceeds $600 billion annually when factoring in counterfeit goods, cyber intrusions, and insider threats.

Yet most organizations allocate fewer than 3% of their intelligence budgets to defensive economic intelligence (DEI) functions, according to a 2023 SCIP (Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals) survey of 412 corporate intelligence leaders. The imbalance is stark: adversaries invest systematically; defenders react episodically.

SOURCES

[1]U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence — Annual Threat Assessment 2024 (dni.gov)

[2]FBI Economic Espionage Unit — Trade Secret Theft Statistics and Case Summaries 2023 (fbi.gov)

[3]Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) 2023 — Insider Threat and Supply Chain Chapters

[4]Ponemon Institute — 2023 Cost of Insider Threats Global Report

[5]ENISA Threat Landscape 2023 — Supply Chain and State-Sponsored Economic Espionage (enisa.europa.eu)

[6]CISA — Insider Threat Mitigation Guide 2023 (cisa.gov)

[7]CrowdStrike Global Threat Report 2024 — Dwell Time and Detection Benchmarks

[8]Gartner — Security and Risk Management Strategic Asset Protection Survey 2023

[9]European Commission — Economic Security Package and Proposed Outbound Investment Screening Regulation 2023–2024 (ec.europa.eu)

[10]MIT Sloan Management Review — Supply Chain Cybersecurity Post-SolarWinds Analysis 2022