Challenges
The goal of strategy is the pursuit of sustainable competitive advantage. As competitive and business environments evolve, sources of advantage must be perpetually renewed.
Staying ahead of relentless change requires more than just better strategies. It demands that executives remain abreast of emerging strategic phenomena—as well as innovative approaches and new tools for planning development.
BCG Competencies
BCG’s Strategy practice and the firm’s Strategy Institute are committed to exploring the emerging frontiers of strategy—and distilling their most important lessons and insights for clients.
These are among our current focus areas:
Strategy and the Internet. Our research and client work centers on the important implications of Web 2.0 and how its core principles of community and modularity enable a rethinking of industries, business models, operations, and organization to yield better results—faster and at lower cost.
Strategy under Radical Uncertainty. With uncertainty and volatility growing, we are helping clients improve their perception, preparedness, and reaction time. And we are investing in leading-edge tools for war gaming and agent-based simulation.
Advantage in a Networked World. Business performance depends on increasingly complex networks of interactions and relationships—both internal and external. We use our own proprietary software to help clients develop an advantage by understanding, nurturing, and managing these networks.
Strategy and Intellectual Property. More and more, intellectual property is being harnessed as a competitive weapon. We help clients develop intellectual property strategies, unlock latent value, gain insights into competitors’ intentions, and understand the attractiveness of targets for acquisition or partnership.
The Future of Strategy. We can help clients explore and develop five emerging types of advantage defined by BCG's Strategy Institute:
Adaptive—Fostering a capacity for continuous reinvention
Signal—Detecting, capturing, and exploiting information faster and better than rivals
Systems— Shaping and optimizing complex multibusiness systems
People—Leveraging human resources beyond the boundaries of the firm
Social—Embracing new social and ecological expectations in a profitable way