Environmental dynamism and uncertainty could have a negative impact on organizations that wants to be competitive. Thus, organizations must be able to adapt and react constantly to external changes in order to achieve their goals. Nowadays, it is considered crucial to create a systematic process of environmental scanning and information analysis to support decision making processes.

The competitive intelligence process is a systematic way of information management. To achieve a better understanding of competitive intelligence, a broad definition considers it as the action of gathering, analyzing and applying information about products, customers, competitors and other elements of the environment where an organization acts both in the short term and long term planning and decision making processes. A competitive intelligence system is focused on the external changes that could have an impact on business strategy.

An important tool for gathering strategic information are the internal and external networks of competitive intelligence agents implied in the information gathering network. It has been assumed that informal and personal information sources are the most important ones for the functioning of competitive intelligence, like the concept of network, be it formal or informal, is a key element for effective strategic information gathering.

On the other hand, Social Capital is defined as the sum of current and potential sources embedded within, available through, and derived from the network of relationships possessed by an individual or a social unit. Social capital comprises both the network and the assets that may be mobilized through that network.

The University, like any other contemporary organization, must adapt to external changes and socioeconomic demands. Higher education is becoming a highly dynamic and competitive playing field. This forces universities to establish management mechanisms that make it possible for them to foresee and adapt to changes in the environment. One of the most important challenges facing universities in the near future is their adaptation to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). This process requires that universities interact with their external agents in order to draw up an academic portfolio in connection with socioeconomic needs. Interaction with their external agents has played an important role in recent years, so it must be taken into account in the university strategic process.

There are two goals in this current research. Firstly, we will analyse to what extent competitive intelligence is used in Spanish universities and its contribution to decision making and strategic planning. Secondly, we will analyse the components of social capital of higher education that are related to their process of adaptation to the EHEA:

The stage of our research is still exploratory and we have proposed a model, based mainly on the Social Capital Theory that could be used for the analysis of university external information networks and their contribution to the competitive intelligence process.