Gordon Brown wants Britain to become an innovation nation. The challenge is not just helping promising start-ups grow into global companies. It is also helping the two thirds of established businesses that are not innovating to find practical ways to improve what they do.

A client once found builders recommending a cheap stick over their own clever, remote controlled roof window, not because the stick was better, but because nobody had taught the customer what to ask for. The digital customer journey has the same problem now, except the person at the counter is increasingly an AI powered chatbot deciding what to recommend.

Brands are as much a city's culture as its music or art. Gorman is as Melbourne as Factory Records was Manchester. Loving these places means feeling genuinely torn: wanting them to stay local, and wanting the world to discover them too.

A 2024 Bain study found only 12% of business transformations achieve their original ambition. That figure measures the transformations that were attempted. What about the ones that should have happened and didn't?

Most brand strategy assumes the customer already understands the category. But many of today’s most successful brands in sectors like specialty coffee, alcohol free spirits, cycling and pilates succeeded by being part of building an entirely new category. This article explores why category creation depends less on differentiation and more on education, infrastructure, community, and patience.

Most market entries don't fail at the strategy stage. They fail in the quiet months after launch, when no one is watching the early signals closely enough to course-correct. Here’s our simple tool for businesses considering, or already planning, a move into a new market.

Most research treats businesses as observers of their customers, but rarely as objects of study themselves. Some of the most important strategic findings don’t sit inside the customer's world, or the business's world, but in the gap between them.

The standard vocabulary of market entry talks about entering a market the way we talk about entering a building: crossing a threshold, taking up a position. But markets aren't doors. They're places, with their own rhythms, hierarchies, and codes of belonging. The real challenge isn't entering them, it's being absorbed by them.

Strategy is meant to be lived, not laminated and stuck on a shelf. Why most strategic work fails to survive the day job. And what changes when you treat strategy as a practice rather than an event.