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Report: The Culture of Innovation: What Makes San Francisco Bay Area Companies Different?

Authors: Matthew Le Merle, Sean Randolph and Barry Juruzelski on behalf of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute

"Breakthrough Report Examines the “Secret Sauce” that Makes the Bay Area a Global Innovation Leader"

When it comes to innovation, the San Francisco Bay Area has unique assets that enable it to excel in the world economy. According to a new report released today by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute and Booz & Company, one of those assets is a distinct culture of innovation that can be found in many Bay Area companies.

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Report: Building an External Innovation Capability

Authors: Matthew Le Merle and Jamie Campbell

In the past few years, an increasing number of the largest companies in the world have established a new C-level role—the chief innovation officer—responsible for leading innovation activities throughout the enterprise. As these executives get to work, they quickly find that the pace of innovation has accelerated and that their companies cannot hope to create and develop every possible source of innovation advantage exclusively in-house.

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Report: The Next Wave of Digitization - Setting Your Direction, Building Your Capabilities

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

For more than a decade, powerful new digital approaches to business, and life in general, have come on the scene, yet we are now entering an even more rapid and dramatic period of change. The phenomenon of digitization is reaching an inflection point. Three powerful forces are driving the shift: consumer demand, the push for new technologies, and the prospect of even greater economic benefits.

Every company in every industry will be dramatically affected, and it will be the responsibility of CEOs to lead the charge by building the right capabilities for their companies to remain relevant in the digitized environment, achieve growth, and fend off competitive threats. New technology deployments and related investments will add up to more than even the largest and most resource-endowed enterprises can afford. Trade-offs will be required, and the risks of making the wrong choices will be high. Unlike the technology revolutions of the 1990s and 2000s, this time around the basis of competition will be set by the companies that embrace and deploy digitization in the right places at the right time.

This Perspective provides guidance to CEOs and their management teams about the relevance of digitization in their respective industries, and the factors most likely to accelerate or decelerate the digitization phenomenon. The judgments that companies make now will largely determine their relative competitive position for the foreseeable future.

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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: 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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Report: Stress-Testing the Enterprise with Disrupter Analysis

Author: Matthew Le Merle

Black Swans—unanticipated, catastrophic events—are impossible to predict on an individual basis, but they regularly occur. Too often, the boards and leaders of large companies are unaware of the risks involved in these events, unnecessarily exposing their organizations, their shareholders, and themselves to grave consequences.

The solution to this problem is disrupter analysis. Disrupter analyses supplement the everyday work of the enterprise risk management (ERM) function and are often conducted by external parties. They are achieved using a four-step process that maps the shape of the company; collects and synthesizes a broad list of potential high-magnitude, low-frequency events; determines their consequences; and implements preventive measures to ensure that the company is adequately protected.

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