Kirk Klasson

Archive for White Papers

Value Based Strategy Formulation

Techniques for Creating and Evaluating Strategic Options About five years ago a couple of professors from INSEAD wrote a book about abandoning traditional approaches to strategy formulation in favor of using a white space, clean sheet approach whereby you set aside your current markets, value orientation, economic model, capital obligations, etc. to pursue strategies based […]

Managing Knowledge for Advantage

Now, more than ever before, the returns companies realize are increasingly related to their intellectual assets, and not the tangible assets they manage. Why? Because economic and competitive realities are demanding that companies focus on creating more value from their core business competencies — whether it’s product development, customized services, or managing the relationships they […]

Innovation

The telegraph ranks among the most significant achievements of modern times. By liberating the delivery of communications from the limits of phusical transportation and from humans’ sensory boundaries, the new medium ushered the world into the information age. Invented almost two centuries ago, the telegraph sparked innovation on an unprecedented scale. It immediately precipitated flurries […]

Knowledge Management

Executive Summary: For the past several years, working with clients in the pharmaceutical industry, Cambridge Technology Partners has developed a unique perspective on the tangible economic value of knowledge. Using insights acquired from client engagements and accepted financial principals we have developed a methodology that clearly substantiates the linkage between knowledge management, rapid innovation, and […]

Business Models

Henry Ford once owned a rubber plantation in the Amazon jungle, the better to control and manage the supply of raw material for his tire factories that supplied his auto assembly lines. Now that’s vertical. Fords hierarchical business model yielded exceptional control over the value chain, and for the times, it made good economic sense. […]

Bargaining Power

Last year, when super-CEO Jack Welch described General Electric’s new Internet exchange business, he trumpeted the company’s increased leverage over its suppliers. He missed the point. Bilateral leverage is only part of the equation. For many otherwise smart business leaders, the sheer complexity and fluidity of todays New Economy has muddied the notion of the […]

Customer Acquisition

You’re probably no different from many business people who saw in the Web the ultimate tool for touching new customers all over the world. You marveled at the apparent economics of the medium when compared with proven but costly approaches such as advertising and telesales and direct mail, and you were delighted with the infinitesimal […]

Insights on Technology and Strategy