To remain competitive in today’s dynamic business environment, organizations are constantly required to develop strategic use of sensible information, which is the role of competitive intelligence. In line with a growing openness trend of strategy making, we question, if competitive intelligence has experienced the same trend of being more open over the years. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no systematic literature review (SLR) addressing competitive intelligence practices through the prism of openness. Through analyzing 53 papers, this paper attempts to explore to what extent the three facets of competitive intelligence—monitoring, lobbying, and information protection—opened up to the external and internal environment of the company. Therefore, a four-dimensional framework of openness has been developed. It considers content-oriented and people-oriented openness along with outward-facing and inward-facing openness which highlight the flows of openness within the organizational boundary and the one related to the management team. Our findings reveal that competitive intelligence practices are both content- and people-oriented when it comes to assessing their openness, with a particular emphasis on monitoring practices. This SLR offers valuable insights on the way researchers have identified with the openness characteristics and competitive intelligence and provides new avenues for further research.
