Every month, my friends all over the world send me links on topics that are important to leaders. I’d like to share them with you. Feel free to chip in.

 

Strategy

1. McKinsey Global Survey on M&A practices and capabilities provides better understanding of companies’ M&A overall performance, and shows where the best-performing companies differentiate themselves most from their peers.
2. Bain shares its insights in how companies in developing markets can create the next wave of growth and states that developing-market champions design operating models that suit the strategy yet allow them to adapt to the rapid changes of their businesses.
3. Find some advice on how to innovate your innovation strategy in #1 and #2 Inc. articles.

Innovation

1. Check out the Fast Company’s 2015 list of World’s 50 Innovative companies and find out what brought them to the top.
2. Find out more about new tools that help companies blaze trails to innovation and growth in BCG report.
3. Strategic and organizational factors are what separate successful big-company innovators from the rest of the field. McKinsey covers the eight essentials of innovation.
4. The simple rules of disciplined innovation: how to select innovations, how to innovate, how to innovate together avoiding intellectual property violations.
5. Bain suggests that instead of innovating to offset the hemorrhaging from top products, winning consumer goods companies should seek ways to use innovation to reboot their best-sellers.
6. The Business Innovation Observatory publishes the fourth trend report ‘Disruptive innovations and forward-looking policies towards smart value chains’. The three emerging trends of ‘Service innovation for smart industry’, ‘Traceability across the value chain’ and the ‘Internet of Things’ are investigated in the batch of case studies.

Entrepreneurship

1. Entrepreneur Magazine released First Entrepreneur 360 Performance Index, The Most Comprehensive Analysis Of Private Companies In America. The study uncovers six paths for achieving sustainable growth and recognizes the distinguished group of extraordinary companies demonstrating them.
2. Large companies and entrepreneurs face cultural barriers to achieving open innovation, finds Accenture Study. The report also reveals that greater digital collaboration between G20 large companies and entrepreneurs could result in an additional $1.5 trillion in global economic output and makes a series of recommendations for them.
3. Look at several examples of how corporations can harness the agility and creativity of early-stage teams to advance their businesses into new categories.

Creativity

1. We often focus on how to foster creative thinking, but much of the time, the challenge is that we fail to capture the bursts of inspiration we do have, or fail to recall ideas when they can actually be useful. Find out more about capturing creativity with a digital notebook program.
2. HBR highlights 3 ways leaders accidentally undermine their teams’ creativity.
3. New research shows that teams are in fact, less creative than individuals. Find out more about social effects that dampen creativity here.

Start-ups

1. SwitchPitch startup collaboration solution allows big companies to outline specific problems they are trying to solve and look to entrepreneurs for ideas.
2. Rocketbolt startup helps big companies close more sales with the help of intelligent lead tracking platform.
3. To become an industry leader through disruption you should think like a startup from within your company. Here is some simple ways to get started.
4. Harvard Business Review gives 4 tips for launching minimum viable products inside big companies by using lean startup principles.
5. FT gives a short insight in why big businesses should keep a close eye on their start-up peers.

 

Sharing Economy

1. Jeremiah Owyang, founder of Crowd Companies, speaking about the Collaborative Economy puts together a helpful visual , honeycomb, that paints a picture of the “sharing economy” and explains how CE affects the future of work.
2. London has emerged as one of the world’s leading hubs for “sharing economy” companies. Forbes explains why.
3. The sharing economy has changed everything. What companies are at risk and what are ideally positioned to benefit?

 

Digital

1. McKinsey suggests three ways to win in e-commerce for CPG companies.
2. BCG highlights an example of five companies that launched digital transformations. These case studies illustrate how companies in every industry can capitalize on digital by launching small-scale projects and building up their capabilities through real-world experience.
3. BCG explains how to jump-start a digital transformation by applying a three-step transformation framework.
4. How do leading companies transition to digital, and what role can the chief digital officer play? In this interview, McKinsey director Kate Smaje explains.
5. CMOs are missing trends in digital marketing dealing with mobile as a portable version of the desktop web. Meanwhile it takes an entirely new and innovative digital playbook to compete. Read more about winning micro-moments here.
6. In its new brief, Bain explains what has become the driving force behind the growth of Generation #hashtag and what a playbook for the native digital era is.
7. Digital disruption is picking up steam across B2B markets. Bain explains what changes are expected and what capabilities companies should have in order to capitalize on the opportunities inherent in the new digital buying behaviors.

Photo: Kristina