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Research on prior information systems highlights the vital role of information and knowledge in explaining firms’ performance. At the same time, the literature on innovation has shown that accessing and integrating knowledge from sources outside of the firm—such as customers, competitors, universities, or consultants—is crucial to the success of firms’ innovations. In this paper, we draw on the knowledge-based view of the firm to investigate how firms absorb relevant information from their external sources, and how they exploit it in their business activities. This study seeks to improve our understanding of the development of absorption capacity through the concept of business intelligence. We test our model on a sample of 145 employees of French SMEs, using the structural equation method to empirically validate our model. The results show that business intelligence has a positive effect on the enhancement of French SMEs’ absorption capacity.