Are there really people or organizations out there that specialize in this?
After seeing a bunch of reports on how big a threat this poses to industry it made me wonder if it is only committed by disgruntled employees out of greed,or if there is a more organized element?
IIRC, this isn’t really a specialized occasion, but during the beginning of the industrialization, a few Americans went over to Britain to ‘steal’ their machine designs and what not. I think the posed as a potential investor, and when they got the tour of the factory, they memorized everything and when to their hotels or inns and wrote everything down that they could remember. It’s a shame the names escape me. 
There is a bit of info. on this topic, like
I won’t go so far as to call it espionage, but the pharmaceutical industries employ “Competitive Intelligence Agencies”. Among other things, they attempt to ascertain contact information for key personnel, or even who the key personnel are, for purpose of hostile recruitment. I work in a division of a Pharma that includes a Regulatory & Business Intelligence group. This is the White Hat side of intelligence, gathering public accessable & Freedom Of Information Act material, and analyzing it to determine market, regulatory, and competitive trends & intentions, so that my company can make ‘informed business decisions’.
So, yeah, it’s going on.
Sure, there are ongoing efforts to find out what the competition knows or what they’re up to. Most of these efforts are relentless, but legal. Some are not.
I’ve never run across an industrial “spy” agency, but there are plenty of services that compile and distribute all that can be publicly known about industry activity, and everybody uses them. On a more personal level, individuals may trade information - give up some details that are proprietary to their company in order to get something important to their own projects from an individual at another company.
And, of course, it doesn’t take very long in any competitive business to develop a certain consciousness about what you’ve got exposed. I can read upside down, just like everybody else.