It has become convetional wisdom that an organization's ability to continuosly generate intelligence about customer's expressed and latent needs, and about how to satisfy those needs, is essential for it to continuously create superior customer value. However, inteligence generation typically has been treated as a generic firm activity. The authors propose that there are four distinct modes of intelligence generation, each of which is part of a well- developed intelligence generation capability. The article reports the result of an exploratory study that supportd this proposition.