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.

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.

The benefits of having an entrepreneurial culture are clear—it leads to more effective and loyal employees, higher levels of innovation, and faster reaction times, just to name a few. But entrepreneurial environments aren’t just for small start-ups in new markets—even large companies in existing business sectors can create an entrepreneurial environment by employing five key enablers, explain Monitor’s Francesco Fazio, Joel Finlayson and Neil Pearse in this article.

Determining and communicating the economic value of a product is one of the major strategic imperatives for the pharmaceutical industry as regulatory agencies move toward comparative effectiveness approaches and value-based pricing. Monitor’s Comparative Clinical and Economic Value (CCEV™) approach enables companies to apply economic-value-based thinking across the entire development, commercialization and health care delivery process.

At a time when the global life sciences and pharmaceutical industries are beset by major challenges, including patent cliffs, skyrocketing costs of drug approvals and failures in key trials, China is spending billions of dollars on life sciences initiatives. This report finds China poised to become the global leader in life science discovery and innovation within the decade.

In this article, Monitor’s Thomas Nagle and Lisa T. Thompson explain how companies can create profitable business models by integrating marketing and operations decision-making. In choosing revenue sources that leverage their strengths, and defining elements of sales that cause functional costs to vary, companies find growth.

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.