Report: The Rise of Generation C - Implications for the World of 2020

Authors: Matthew Le Merle, Roman Friedrich, Michael Peterson and Alex Koster

In the course of the next 10 years, a new generation—Generation C—will emerge. Born after 1990, these “digital natives,” just now beginning to attend university and enter the workforce, will transform the world as we know it. Their interests will help drive massive change in how people around the world socialize, work, and live their passions—and in the information and communication technologies they use to do so.

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Report: Outsourcing in Life Sciences: A Survey of BayBio Members

Authors: Matthew Le Merle, Gail Maderis, Tara Churik, and Charlie Beever on behalf of BayBio

Emerging life science companies and large pharmaceutical firms have much to gain from outsourcing clinical development programs. The industry is increasingly turning to outside clinical research organizations (CROs) to provide specific capabilities and added capacity when needed. Clinical development outsourcing is likely to continue to grow and spread to different parts of the globe as drugmakers seek long-term strategic partnerships with outsourcers, including IT providers.

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Press: From Social Gaming to Social Everything

Author: Matthew Le Merle published in the Financial Times

By now every CEO has read about the 850m (and rising) active monthly users of Facebook and the attractiveness of other social networks including Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn.  As much as 50 percent of Facebook’s revenue is driven by social games such as Cityville, Draw Something and Happy Aquarium (Facebook discloses that 12 per cent of its 2011 revenue came from Zynga alone).

These incredible revenue numbers are making social games companies extremely valuable. Last year’s IPO of five-year-old San Francisco-based Zynga left it with a market capitalisation of more than $7.5bn, and this year’s IPO of London-based competitor Zattikka demonstrates continued investor interest in this phenomenon. Every chief executive watching this meteoric rise wants to know how these social gaming leaders have created so much shareholder value so quickly and whether they can do the same by digitizing and socializing their own offerings.

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Report: The Root Causes of Value Destruction: How Strategic Resiliency Can Help

Authors: Matthew Le Merle, Christopher Dann, and Christopher Pencavel

The authors work demonstrates that strategic risks caused the greatest amount of shareholder value destruction in some of the world’s biggest companies during the past 10 years. This happens because enterprise teams relegate risk management to their enterprise risk management (ERM) teams. Instead, they must revise their approach to strategic decision making, augmenting traditional cost and value considerations with risk and resiliency considerations. This involves broadening the team’s awareness about uncertainty and risk, integrating risk awareness into strategic decision making, and adopting strategic resiliency thinking.

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Press: Technologist Transform Thyself

Author: Matthew Le Merle published in the Financial Times

Global technology industry leaders have become giants fueled by the digital technologies that they unleashed on other people’s businesses. Those technologies are now undermining the very parents that bred and raised them. That’s a problem - but also an opportunity. The technology companies that learn how to successfully manage the same transformations they thrust upon other industries will be the ones that are “fit for growth” in the digitally enabled technology industry of the future.

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Editorial: How to Prepare for the Future of the IT Solutions Industry

Author: Matthew Le Merle published in CRN.com

Digital technologies are rapidly enabling new offerings and business models across all industries, including IT. Cloud infrastructure and on-demand business models, connectivity and mobility, big data handling and analysis, and social and local technologies are driving the world’s largest IT companies to change their go-to-market operating models and launch new products and solutions.

Report: The Lesson of Lost Value

Authors: Matthew Le Merle, Christopher Dann, Chris Pencavel

Published in Strategy + Business Magazine

Many benchmarks of corporate practice start by looking at successful companies. We decided to study the biggest losers: companies that, in one way or another, had seen their fortunes go south over a 10-year period. We had gone through this exercise once before. In 2004, when the Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom scandals were fresh, we surveyed thousands of public companies and determined that, contrary to prevailing wisdom, it was not compliance issues that were most responsible for destroying shareholder value. That distinction went to the mismanagement of strategic risks — those risks embedded in the top-level decisions made by the executive team, such as what products and services to offer, whether to outsource manufacturing, or what acquisitions to make.

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Report: Measuring Industry Digitization: Leaders and Laggards in the Digital Economy

Authors: Matthew Le Merle, Roman Friedrich, Alex Koster and Florian Groene

The pace of digitization is picking up rapidly but the speed at which digitization is taking place varies a great deal from industry to industry. To gain a better understanding of the relative degree to which digitization is transforming different industries, we have created the Industry Digitization Index. Whether they are currently digitization leaders or laggards, all industries can benefit by investing in the input, processing, and output capabilities needed to extend their digital footprints throughout their business ecosystems.

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Report: 2011 - The Impact of Internet Privacy Regulations on Early-Stage Investment

Authors: Matthew Le Merle, Raju Sharma, Tashfeen Ahmed, and Chris Pencavel

As we move into a new era of Internet growth fueled by new and emerging technologies, it will be increasingly important to understand the effect that regulatory changes might have on the Internet’s growth. One area currently being debated is online privacy, and regulators are evaluating several potential changes to current law that would have a large impact not only on the content providers but also on the online user experience. Our study captures these dimensions by understanding how these regulatory changes might affect early-stage investment.

This report was financed by Google Inc.

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