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Strategy isn't written in stone. Rather strategy is built upon a given set of economics - at the simplest level, a set of payoffs.

Today's economics are in shock - numerous shocks are rolling across the global economic landscape.

As economics changes, so must strategy. What was "strategic" yesterday is less and less strategic today.

And that requires us to have strategic imagination: to be able to imagine fundamentally new possibilities for truly strategic behaviour.

Now, that's hard work. Very few companies are able to tap - let alone master - strategic imagination.

Why not? Strategic imagination is tremendously difficult because it requires us to put aside yesterday's tired assumptions and orthodoxies, and begin to actively rethink from scratch the way value can be, should be, must be, will be created.

The surest, most lethal killer of strategic imagination is being reined in by orthodoxy: thinking that tomorrow must be like yesterday.

Here are a few examples of strategic imagination:

It was naïve for Apple to think that it could make a better mobile phone from scratch - and that a simple phone could redesign the rotting mobile value chain - or so Nokia and Sony Ericsson thought. It was naïve for Tata to believe that a car affordable for the world's poor could ever be designed, let alone produced - or so Detroit thought. It was naïve for Google to focus on doing no evil before focusing on revenue and profitability - or so Big Media thought. It was naïve for P&G to open up, and explore radical new modes of interaction, instead of pursuing orthodox advantage by staying closed - or so Wal-Mart thought. It was naïve for H&M and Zara to imagine that cheap clothes could be hyperfashionable - more fashionable than couture - or so the Gap thought. What do these examples have in common? They're examples of strategic imagination that required firms to be naïve: to start from scratch, to see, in Technicolor, a better world not constrained by today's stifling and suffocating status quo. Ratan Tata, in the article above, talks about a "leap of faith". That's the next stage of strategic imagination: being able to see and then believe in a vastly different, radically better future - and not being limited to seeing and believing in a grainy, washed-out future that seems depressingly inevitable.

But taking leaps of faith is exactly what orthodox firms are built not to do.

The edgeconomy demands firms explode their capacity for strategic imagination.

That's why only a single player on that list is an orthodox incumbent - P&G: the rest are new entrants, or lateral entrants.

Another example. I've been talking about artificial scarcity quite a bit. Here's JP Rangaswami discussing responding to artificial scarcity with artificial abundance. Now that's the beginnings of strategic imagination.

Edge strategy isn't for incrementalists. Those who think games built for an industrial era are still the only ones worth playing need not apply.

Rather, it takes a profound appetite for revolution: a profound ability to let go of yesterday's stale, tired, and thoroughly toxic orthodoxies - to explode the shrunken, stunted strategic imagination the industrial-era firm suffers from.

There are a couple of common misconceptions about boutique firms. One is that being a "boutique consulting firm" necessarily implies being a small firm. This is not the case. A boutique is determined not by size, but by focus. L.E.K. Consulting (which was founded by a handful of former Bain partners) has roughly 500 employees, but we would consider the company a boutique because of its specific focus on three types of strategy consulting problems-M&A, shareholder value, and business strategy. Another misconception is that boutiques are less prestigious than the multi-functional firms. This highly depends on the area of focus. For example, BCG is extremely well-regarded across many industries for most types of strategy problems, but for a decision analysis or real options strategy problem, clients might turn to Strategic Decisions Group, which focuses on those areas.

All this said, we should note that many boutiques are indeed small, ranging from upwards of 200 employees down to a single consultant. Often, boutique consulting firms grow from the expertise and client relationships of one to five founding partners, and unless it sells a consistently large flow of work, the firm has no compelling reason to grow quickly. Also, smaller boutiques can deliver services at lower costs than the larger consultancies because a smaller firm requires less overhead and less extra "capacity" (i.e., consultants), so their services might seem more attractive to prospective clients than those of the more expensive firms. If you are especially interested in a particular industry or type of consulting problem, definitely do your homework on the outstanding boutiques in that field. If you find the right company to match your interests, you will spend all of your time doing the work you dreamt of, and that is a much harder goal to achieve within a more diverse consulting firm.

Examples of boutique consulting projects: A consulting firm with a well-known shareholder value methodology helps a beverage company establish value metrics in its business units An economics consulting firm helps a foreign government decide how to structure the privatization (sale) of its utilities through an auction A niche R&D strategy consulting firm deploys two consultants to a high-growth semiconductor company in Silicon Valley for a 3 month project to improve R&D processes A process reengineering boutique snares a 6-month project to assist implementation of new supplier standards for an automotive consortium A turnaround consulting firm helps a telecommunications hardware firm restructure its organization until Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Leading boutique and internal consulting firms include: Charles River Associates (economics and litigation consulting) L.E.K. Consulting (shareholder value, M&A, and business strategy) Marakon Associates (shareholder value methodology)

Corporate Venturing Performance: An Investigation Into the Applicability of Venture Capital Models This paper reports a study that examined this assertion more directly through surveying 95 corporate venture units across 3 continents (Europe, South East Asia and North America) and examining the association between their organizational structures, management practices and investment practices, and multiple measures of venture unit performance. Regression analyses found...

In Search of Corporate Renewal - Focus on Corporate Venturing In today's rapidly changing business environment established companies venture to sustain growth and corporate renewal. But developing new business from scratch takes time. Thus companies find it hard to justify investments in venturing: when measured by financial terms only, the track record of corporate venturing is poor. This paper drafts...

Corporate Venturing: Gold Mining or Fool's Gold? This paper begins with a discussion of corporate venturing basics including the rationale for initiating a corporate venture group, a comparison to traditional venture capital firms, and the many approaches to corporate venturing. Next there is an in depth discussion of the current corporate venture landscape including examples of successful...

External Corporate Venturing - Exploration and Exploitation External corporate venturing, which is new business creation activity through organizational modes such as corporate venture capital, alliances, acquisitions, or spin offs has received relatively scant attention in the corporate entrepreneurship literature. Based on seven in-depth case studies of large European and U.S. firms in the information and communication technology...

Corporate Venturing Modes and Their Impact on Corporate Learning Learning and increased innovation are often mentioned as some of the key benefits from corporate venturing for corporations. However, little research exists that would analyze whether there are systematic differences in learning outcomes across different governance modes. This paper systematically analyzes how the governance choice between different external corporate venturing...

Selection in Corporate Venturing This paper argues that the ability to select more profitable ventures while at the same time avoid selecting away promising ventures is dependent on not only the choice of selection strategies but increasingly on the corporate venture firms' selection capacity. This capacity is largely a function of the committed participation...

Corporate Venturing - The Rolls-Royce Model Rolls-Royce had previously become involved in Corporate Venturing in the late 80s and early 90s with what many might view as some success. With a dedicated team of three or four they had achieved a revenue from licensing of several million Pounds a year. However, in the bearish mood of...

Corporate Venturing The purpose of this paper is to comment on the challenges that Corporations find when deciding to setup an equity investment arm: Corporate Ventures CVs. This paper will focus on three different challenges, covering the reasons why Corporations decide initiate CVs, the main structural differences between CVs and Venture Capital...

Managing Innovation Through Corporate Venturing Innovation involves applying creative ideas to find solutions to organizational problems. It enables organizations to overhaul their systems and processes and increase the quality of their products. However, the paper argues that a certain degree of commercialization is required to successfully use innovation for better results. A related model is...

Adventures In Corporate Venturing From the executive summary: ‘Companies that are successful in developing new ventures have a clearly articulated portfolio management strategy covering five areas: type of business opportunity, capital investment parameters, degree of operational involvement, links with core businesses, and other such objectives.’ The companies prefer creating a separate subsidiary because the...

Corporate Venturing? Make Sure its Cautious Venturing Working with corporate venturers can provide venture capital and private equity firms with a rich source of investment opportunities. Corporate venturing can entail different things, depending on the corporate in question. A question remains in the minds of many VC investors: is the reduction in operational and competitive risk merely...

Internal Corporate Venturing Cycles: A Nagging Strategic Leadership Challenge Thirty years of systematic study reveal that many major corporations experience a strange cyclicality in their Internal Corporate Venturing ICV activity: Periods of intense activity are followed by periods of shutting down such activities only to be followed by a new cycle a few years later. Based on analysis of...

Breaking the Frame: Radical Change Through External Corporate Venturing Recently several authors have argued that faced with dramatic change, the firm needs to expand its search space beyond local search to develop new cognitive frameworks that can guide behavior in the changed or changing environment. This paper contributes to this emerging stream of literature by investigating mechanisms that enable...

Building External Corporate Venturing Capability: Initial Conditions, Learning Processes and Knowledge Management How firms build new capabilities to adapt to changing environments is in the core of strategic management. However, only recently research has addressed this question. In this paper a model has been developed that lays out how firms develop a capability to create and develop ventures through corporate venture capital,...

External Corporate Venturing: Bridging, Execution, and Value Enactment Building on Eisenhardt & Martin, this paper examines one important dynamic capability of firms, that of External Corporate Venturing ECVC. The external corporate venturing capability consists of the following elements: ability to bridge between the corporation and the start-up community; and ability to execute venturing relationships for the rapid development...

A few of the academic presenters talked about the environment the perceived participation exists in.

What did we find?

Information needs to be sorted around people, not content

[MicroMeme: A conversation with your immediate network about what they think is the most important]

First, we vetted the 100 vendors to submit to a vendor product catalog, over 50 submitted which we used the data to pair down who were appropriate for the Wave report. Hands-on lab evaluations: I spent up to 6 hours with each vendor in a windowless room to evaluate their product live using common customer scenarios. I grilled the executive team, and discussed their strengths and weaknesses. Product demos. We asked vendors to conduct demonstrations of their products’ functionality. We used findings from these product demos to validate details of each vendor’s product capabilities. Customer reference calls. To validate product and vendor qualifications, Forrester also conducted reference calls with up to three of each vendor’s current customers for a total of up to 27 customer calls. We collected hundreds of screenshots, presentations, samples, reports and all of this information was entered in a multi-tab spreadsheet that accounts for thousands of cells, scoring, and detailed explanations which clients can use to toggle up and down specific needs as in some cases, specific feature needs may need to be highlighted over others. In the bottom links, I’ve made my research process very transparent, and have indicate the other three other blog posts documenting this laborious research effort.

Related Resources I’ll be updating this section as I see interesting voices from media, vendors, brands and customers. Read Write Web: Report: Community Platforms Market Led by Jive Software and Telligent Leverage Software CEO Mike Walsh (and other vendors) have responded in the comments Josh Bernoff: Picking a community vendor? We’ve evaluated a bunch . . . Tom Humbarger: Questions if these vendors are eating their own dog food read Walking the “Social Media Walk” Telligent’s corporate blog chimes in and makes the report available for you. Read more about this Wave Research project: Part 1: Starting the Wave Part 2: Data Collection Process Part 3: The Analysis Process Part 4: Announcing the Wave, the final report

Friendfeed is an example of the trend the web is headed: content sorted by people, not by topic.