Philip Evans
Senior Advisor
Boston
Philip Evans is a senior advisor at The Boston Consulting Group and a BCG Fellow. He founded BCG’s media and Internet sectors and has done consulting work with corporations worldwide in the consumer goods, health care, financial-services, media, retail, and high-technology industries. He has also advised governments on military organization, homeland security, economic development, and digital policy.
Philip’s professional focus is on technology and business strategy. He has advised clients on community-centric marketing, tapping user-generated content, the architecture of open collaboration and innovation, network-based strategy, infrastructure economics, big data, privacy, and the deconstruction of value chains.
He is the author of many publications, including four Harvard Business Review articles. One of these—“Strategy and the New Economics of Information”—won a McKinsey Prize, which is awarded annually for the best contributions to the Review. Blown to Bits, Philip’s book on the new economics of information (coauthored with BCG's Tom Wurster), was the best-selling book worldwide on technology and strategy in 2000.
Philip is a frequent speaker on technology and strategy at industry, corporate, and academic conferences and has given keynote addresses at conferences convened by Bill Gates, Michael Milken, and the World Economic Forum. He has addressed closed-door sessions of the world’s telecommunication regulators in Geneva, privacy authorities in Uruguay, and the cabinet-level Senior Executive Council of the Pentagon. His TED talk has been viewed over a million times.
He contributed to an online course on Digital Transformation. The course, developed by BCG in partnership with the University of Virginia Darden School of Business and Coursera, enables students to examine the pace of digital change and the imperative it creates for businesses.
He was designated by Walter Kiechel as one of the 15 “Lords of Strategy” in Kiechel's book of that title.
Philip is a member of the British-North American Committee and on the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute.
With powerful algorithms becoming table stakes, finding and gathering the right data to feed those engines will be the key to a company’s success.
A discussion based on BCG’s 21st annual Value Creators’ Report. The "Superincumbent’s Dilemma" is the choice between stagnant profitability and dilutive growth, facing many of our clients. We discuss the exhaustion of traditional bases of value creation in the paradoxical context of rapid technological change, and how incumbents (unlike “disruptors”) are prisoners of old paradigms. We propose a set of principles for strategy, finance and shareholder value management.
New competitors are changing how the game is played. Traditional winners must adjust by adopting key strategies of digital natives.
Companies have a choice: either transform IT to be able to work closely with business units in developing products and services or focus IT on its governance role.
Two complementary technologies—blockchain and digital tokens—give data the continuity of physical assets and help solve the challenges of digital identity and trust. And they have the potential to wipe out the middleman across a wide swath of industries.
Bitcoin depends on two complementary technologies, digital tokens and blockchain, that together facilitate digital identity, ownership, transactions, contracts, and trust.
There are many applications that could benefit from decreased transaction costs, a neutral shared database, and the superior security of a shared ledger. Here are a few.
The banking industry’s structure is moving to industry stacks, reflecting a shift from competition among vertically integrated companies to horizontal competition at each layer of the banking business.
Three distinct waves of digital disruption are transforming strategy. Changing information economics enable new strategies—as well as radically new structures for businesses and industries.
Unlike start-ups that can singularly focus on disruptive opportunities, incumbent technology, media, and telecom companies must walk a tightrope. They must sustain their legacy businesses while finding ways to take advantage of disruption.
