Monitor Group and Al-Sayedah Khadijah Bint Khuwalid Businesswomen Center carried out a study on current and aspiring female business owners in Saudi Arabia to better understand the challenges and opportunities facing Saudi businesswomen and provide reliable data about them. The report also identifies practical ways to support Saudi businesswomen.

The world’s rapidly growing megacities represent significant opportunities for companies seeking new markets and justify a unique approach to an important source of potential growth. In this article, Jennifer Lacks Kaplan and Mark Pocharski explain what it takes for companies to build winning strategies to take advantage of this growth opportunity.

Pedro Arboleda, a partner at Monitor, writes in the ABC newspaper of Madrid, that commercially-effective innovation requires a clear alignment of interests among people critical to the innovation process—scientists, entrepreneurs, financiers, managers, and even politicians—all of whom provide the necessary ingredients for the special innovation “sauce” to have a viable life in the marketplace.

In this article, “How Innovation Really Works,” experts from Monitor produced a special research report with Business Today to explore how Monitor’s Ten Types of Innovation™ framework applies to growing, innovative companies in India.

In a new report tracking sovereign wealth fund investments, Monitor Group and Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei found that the funds had adapted to the global economic downturn by realigning investment strategies with long-term goals and pursuing joint investments to share risk.

In the lead article of Tharawat magazine’s 6th volume, Monitor's Kristina Rogers and Dr. Steffen Gackstatter explore the applicability of the Open Innovation concept to the Arab family business construct.

In this feature article "Shotgun Blues" from The Conference Board Review, Monitor's Bansi Nagji and Brian Quinn explain how corporate leaders can set a course to innovate in their organizations and industries to unlock value and create new opportunities for growth.

On Wall Street, bankers continue to speculate about a government role in their future compensation. Although policymakers shelved the issue during the health care showdown in the United States and the Greek debt crisis in Europe, that suspension is likely to be temporary. Seldom have the heads of the world’s leading economies demonstrated such unanimity of opinion on a controversy. President Obama expressed disgust over bankers’ bonuses. In London, City Minister Paul Myners, called “grotesque” the news that 5,000 London bankers would receive bonuses of 1 million pounds.  French President Nicolas Sarkozy received widespread applause at Davos when he stated that pay packages that “bear no relationship to merit” are “morally indefensible.” The scrutiny and torrent of criticism is bound to reemerge, as New York officials reported that Wall Street bonuses grew 17 percent in 2009 to surpass $20 billion. Rarely has any economic issue been better suited to populist political rhetoric.

The Journal of Applied Corporate Finance has republished a 2002 article “Just Say No to Wall Street: Putting a Stop to the Earnings Game,” by Monitor's Joseph Fuller and Michael Jensen of Harvard Business School. The article argues that CEOs should manage expectations "in such a way that their stocks trade reasonably close to their intrinsic value. In place of earnings forecasts, management should provide information about the company’s strategic goals and main value drivers. They should also discuss the risks associated with the strategies, and management’s plans to deal with them."

In this article adapted from the authors’ new book, The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing (Prentice Hall, 2010), coauthors Thomas T. Nagle, Joseph Zale and John Hogan explore how executives can create pricing policies that lead to profitable and productive customer relationships.