Larry Keeley, an innovation expert and partner at Monitor, explains how Kodak’s famous failure to enter digital photography quickly can be a useful lesson for executives looking to innovate now. He writes that a new form of strategic thinking, convergences, “gives leaders a deeper sense of the interdependencies that connect firms, products, systems and services in new ecosystems” and reveals emerging opportunities, typically at the junction of new technologies and customer behaviors.

The global economy faces serious risks of a second “great recession” if world leaders fail to cooperate on solutions to prevent “near-term economic divisions to devolve into deeper-seated geopolitical divisions,” write Peter Schwartz, Jonathan Star, and Nikhil Prasad Ojha in The Times of India newspaper. In this piece that demonstrates scenario thinking, the authors project the global economy is likely to go through a near-term period of low growth. The long-term prognosis then depends on the actions—or failures—of leaders to respond.

Roger Martin, the author of Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL, discussed his ideas for changing executive compensation, financial services regulation, and tax policies to rebuild an economy that generates prosperity and growth. The interview with Monitor’s Steven Goldbach is part of Monitor’s “Insights from the Field” series of discussions with leaders sharing their perspectives on important issues.

When it comes to innovation, sometimes organizations need to get out of their own way. Orthodoxies, or tightly held beliefs that guide a company’s decisions, can be dangerous to a company’s success, write Monitor’s Bansi Nagji and Helen Walters in the Fall 2011 issue of Rotman Magazine, published by the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. As a result, they write, orthodoxies must constantly be sought out and “flipped” for a business to stay at the forefront of its industry—or even to stay afloat.

“At a time when we are constantly being told to value the new and the different, it may come as a surprise to learn that the standard, the shared and the common can be strong drivers of transformation,” writes Monitor’s Henry King, in this essay for Fast Company Design. King, who is an associate partner with the innovation strategy firm Doblin, part of Monitor Group, cites five illustrations from business to demonstrate how standardization—in business processes, common organizational goals, common platforms, shared cultural values, and equipment interfaces—are critical tools of innovation.

In this webcast, Monitor’s thought leaders discuss the latest research into the psychology behind decision-making and memory formation, using this framework to identify a practical approach for getting customers to remember your company’s messages and assessing the quality of your customer engagement strategy.

This white paper by experts from Monitor and Global Business Network (GBN) analyzes the impact that deep structural shifts in commodities markets will have on the competitive landscape, including the critical supply chain and business location decisions C-level executives will face as higher prices for food, fuel and minerals become permanent.

In these video highlights from Monitor’s recent webcast, “Improving Innovation Returns Through Business Model Innovation,” Monitor thought leaders discuss how analytic tools can provide better decision-making insights to help executives vastly improve their innovation success rates and ensure their business model investments generate bigger returns.

In this animated video, Monitor partner Steven Goldbach explains that integrated marketing teams should be modeled more like hockey teams than football teams—they should be composed of quick-thinking and fast-acting team members instead of specialized, inflexible individual players.

Many companies experience cycles in which revenue growth and cost cutting alternate in focus. While these cycles are understandable, they often damage long-term profitability. In this article, Monitor's Robert Browne, Josh Lee, Mike Standing and Lisa S. Thompson present the Delivering Measurable Results approach, which helps firms escape these cycles of revenue growth and cost cutting by developing programs that can sustainably improve their margins.