Background: Competitive intelligence (CI) provides actionable intelligence, which provides a competitive edge in enterprises. However, without proper process, it is difficult to develop actionable intelligence. There are disagreements about how the CI process should be structured. For CI professionals to focus on producing actionable intelligence, and to do so with simplicity, they need a common CI process model.

Objectives: The purpose of this research is to review the current literature on CI, to look at the aims of identifying and analysing CI process models, and finally to propose a universal CI process model.

Method: The study was qualitative in nature and content analysis was conducted on all identified sources establishing and analysing CI process models. To identify relevant literature, academic databases and search engines were used. Moreover, a review of references in related studies led to more relevant sources, the references of which were further reviewed and analysed. To ensure reliability, only peer-reviewed articles were used.

Results: The findings reveal that the majority of scholars view the CI process as a cycle of interrelated phases. The output of one phase is the input of the next phase.

Conclusion: The CI process is a cycle of interrelated phases. The output of one phase is the input of the next phase. These phases are influenced by the following factors: decision makers, process and structure, organisational awareness and culture, and feedback.

Changes and challenges that have occurred in the past two decades have forced a radical shift in the basic foundations of how business is conducted. Internal, as well as external forces have forced organisations to constantly monitor their surrounding environment in order to create an awareness of opportunities and threats to allow them to survive in their competitive environment.Organisations need to gather all the information at their disposal, and turn the raw data into intelligence through a process of analysis and an exercise of human judgement. By utilising the potential offered by information systems in the process of generating intelligence and creating a corporate knowledge base to be used in strategic decision-making will lead to competitive advantage and constant innovation.Strategic Intelligence has information as its foundation. This research proposes that through its ability to absorb sources of information, the synergy of Business Intelligence, Competitive Intelligence, and Knowledge Management combined to form Strategic Intelligence, will allow organisations to incorporate all of their information and intellectual capital into a single database or system which will meet the intelligence requirements of management.

Becoming globally competitive has requires specific skills in developing economies as these environments are far more complex. Business as a complex system requires acknowledgement that we cannot control organizations to the degree that a mechanistic perspective will. Moreover, as the system's environment changes, so does the behaviour of its agents. Thus, the behaviour of the system as a whole can change. Linear strategies and decision making techniques become irrelevant with a shift to patterns and relationships between entities. Developing economies, especially, are more prone to the implementation of non-linear solutions because of the nature of the variables, the changes and interplays between the variables, the significant human focus and the consequent organic nature of the competitiveness. These variables introduce an unavoidable element of unpredictability/randomness into any management decisions. Complexity allows for pattern recognition which requires focusing on competencies, activities, technologies or resources signaling patterns that will impact on innovation, especially with respect to organizational, management and technological forms. Technology as knowledge is an intrinsic part of the pattern recognition the implementation of the above forms of innovation. This paper discusses the role of non linear management theories in a complex environment with regards to these innovations. In this sense, a resilience engineering approach provides the space for innovation implementation and the focus on organizational and management innovation through complex adaptive systems. The literature abounds with research on product and process innovation but less is said about organizational, management or technological innovation and their implementation.

Background: Enterprises face intense competition caused by globalisation. Consequently, enterprises look for tools that provide a competitive advantage. Competitive intelligence (CI) provides a competitive advantage to enterprises of all sizes. There are many definitions of CI but no universally accepted one.Objectives: The purpose of this research is to review the current literature on CI with the aim of identifying and analysing CI definitions to establish the commonalities and differences, to propose a universal and comprehensive definition of CI and to set the borders of CI for common understanding amongst CI stakeholders.Method: The study was qualitative in nature and content analysis was conducted on all identified sources establishing and analysing CI definitions. To identify relevant literature, academic databases and search engines were used. A review of references in related studies led to more relevant sources, the references of which were further reviewed and analysed. Keywords ‘competitive intelligence’, ‘marketing intelligence’ and ‘business intelligence’ were used in search engines to find relevant sources. To ensure reliability, only peer-reviewed articles were used.Results: The majority of scholars define CI as a process and acknowledge that CI is collected from the internal and external or competitive environment. They also outline the goals of CI, which are to help in decision-making and provide a competitive advantage.Conclusion: The proposed definition outlines the process, purpose, source, deliverables, beneficiaries, benefit, ethicality and legality of CI, sets out the borders of CI and ensures a common understanding amongst CI stakeholders

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