An overview of our research practices

Through our research work, we strive to bring our clients access to the wealth of learning and current thinking at leading business schools and top-tier management consulting firms. At the same time, we integrate insights gained through our experience steering companies to increase profit.

Focus

Our research generally follows a few key themes. Recently, our focus has been on improving overall firm productivity and product-market fit. We are also interested in building models and tools to harness and steer emerging market trends, and in how to organize your business to serve customers most effectively.

Our research briefs help illuminate the economic and market situations faced by our clients, providing explanation of what theory and statistics mean to their business today. We draw out and explain the implications of factors like economic data or new management prescriptions to help you understand their applicability to your business.

Our research covers 3 interlocking areas: strategy, marketing, and business process. We strongly believe that these areas provide the foundation for excellent business performance and that each demanding executive attention and management.

Methodology

We follow two core methodologies in preparing our research briefs and in establishing the intellectual property that we use to advise our clients. Both methodologies depend on a great breadth of research materials.

Our primary mode of research is constant information gathering, researching, and investigating in order to maintain current-state knowledge of strategy thinking. It's also critical for monitoring emerging technology, demand, and economic conditions. We are especially interested in the complex interaction of signaling, market reactions, and lagged financial results. To this end, we track the performance of key players as they experiment with emerging business models.

Our second research focus is upon the work necessary to address particular questions, either for continuing research on our own, or in response to a client issue. This point-question analysis takes a wide-ranging form, including broad journal surveys, market research studies, informal interviews, and creation of models. Our goal here is to discover principles that govern interactions between technology, markets, competition, and capital markets.

Resources

We use a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including interviews with leading thinkers and business people. We make extensive use of leading business publications, including The Harvard Business Review, The McKinsey Quarterly, Strategy+Business, MIT's Technology Review, and numerous other resources. For our economic research, we rely primarily upon the statistics published by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, census data, and published market research materials. We supplement this information with commentary from research analysts, staff economists, and leading business publications. We also keep in touch with publications in the area of general business, marketing, strategy, and technology.