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.

With sizable government support, China’s life sciences industry “is quietly gathering a critical mass of skilled talent, and savvy and focused venture investors,” writes Monitor’s George Baeder in the December 2011 issue of Pharmaceutical Executive magazine.

In this special report on innovation in India’s Business Today magazine, Nikhil Prasad Ojha, Parijat Ghosh, Sachin Khandelwal, and Harsh Kapoor from Monitor describe key principles of innovation used by successful companies, from mobile phone provider Safaricom in Kenya, to Mexican cement company Cemex, to GE’s green energy products, to create new ways of doing business. “As markets mature and become more competitive, innovation has become an imperative for firms to survive and win,” the authors write.

Fundamental changes in the health care system are transforming how key stakeholders value, obtain, and process information. While biopharmaceutical companies are experimenting with different solutions, they are not going far enough and fast enough to address new realities. In this article, part of the Monitor Perspectives white paper series, Jeff Wordham and Sheryl L. Jacobson outline how companies can succeed by fundamentally rethinking their approaches to customers, offering and channels.

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 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.

Choosing which innovative ideas to pursue is often an exercise in guesswork. But by using Monitor’s Ten Types of Innovation® and Economic Value Estimation (EVE®) tools, executives can effectively gauge an innovation’s potential, writes Monitor partner Geoff Tuff in this article for the May 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review.

In this report, Monitor Institute and the Knight Foundation examine the role of networks in community life, to see how connected citizens are making a difference and how technology can unlock tremendous assets in communities.

In Monitor’s recent report, “China, the Life Sciences Leader of 2020,” George Baeder and Michael Zielenziger find that China is poised to become the global leader in life science discovery and innovation within the next decade. In these video clips, Baeder and Zielenziger discuss the report’s findings and the implications of this industry shift.