In their quest for innovation-led growth, executives are apt to approach technology investments with a conservative risk-averse mindset. This paper explains how taking an active approach to technology risk management, using three common portfolio management techniques, can reduce uncertainty and increase a company's opportunity for growth.

Monitor Group, one of the world’s leading advisory and consulting firms, and Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, a leading international research center, based in Milan, Italy, released, “Weathering the Storm: Sovereign Wealth Funds in the Global Economic Crisis of 2008,” a new annual report analyzing the effects of the global economic crisis on the behaviors and financial transactions of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs).

A new report from Monitor Group, an in-depth profile of 13 sovereign wealth funds based in the Middle East and North Africa, finds the variation in performance is greater than expected "and indicates that the more mature funds have better risk management systems and organizational architecture better attuned to rapidly changing circumstances," said Monitor's CEO, Mark B. Fuller, who is speaking about the report at the World Economic Forum on the Middle East. 

"It is no surprise that risks have increased worldwide over the last year, as the latest release of the Opacity Index shows." So write Joel Kurtzman, a member of the Monitor Talent network, and Glenn Yago, in their report for the Milken Institute, "Opacity Index 2009: Measuring Global Risks."

Why do organizations get blindsided by market transformations that could have been anticipated?  This article from Strategy & Leadership guides you through a systematic process for incorporating plausible but challenging future scenarios into your organization’s learning processes, to help mitigate risk and decrease the likelihood of being unprepared for discontinuities.

In this essay for The American Scholar Magazine, Monitor co-founder Joseph Fuller argues that Wall Street's use of computer-based models worsened the current financial crisis and recommends ways to make financial firms more responsible for managing the risk these models introduce.

Eastman Chemical Company turned to Monitor Group to help it drive organic growth in a highly competitive and commoditized B2B market for plastic packaging.

In this article from Marketing Management, Courtland Jenkins of Eastman Chemical and Monitor's Geoff Tuff, outline the challenges the company faced and how they worked to solve them: analyzing which customer segments valued Eastman's innovations, understanding the best means for communicating with those customers and demonstrating customer value.

“Paths to Prosperity; Promoting Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century,” a new Monitor Group study, interviewed entrepreneurs in 22 countries to determine attitudes and critical policies required for entrepreneurship to thrive in different regions around the world, including the importance of a society's fostering of entrepreneurial skills and tax policies that encourage R&D.

Monitor's research suggests that while the financial meltdown claimed a number of hedge funds, those funds with activist strategies are worth watching. This report, by Michael Armstrong and Jonathan Joffe from Monitor's Integrated Strategy and Finance practice, describes typical behaviors of shareholder activists and how CEOs and boards of directors can deal with them. 

In the third quarter of 2008, as the global financial crisis continued to worsen, Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) sought to limit their exposure to the riskiness of OECD markets while putting more capital to work in their domestic economies, according to research by Monitor Group. This report is part of a quarterly series Monitor is producing to track the behavior of SWFs.