To succeed with innovation initiatives and transformations, companies often rely on support and partnership with consultancies. This external support normally provides advice, competence and extra capacity to realise the strategic goals, and to do so faster and at lower risk. Choosing the right partner or partner constellations often makes the difference between success and failure and can cost companies millions and millions if not making the right choice. It can also cost decision makers their jobs when strategic goals are not met. So what are the Top 5 mistakes when choosing the right partner?

The level of entrepreneurship in an economy is cyclical, and historically precedes the economic cycle. The post-pandemic recovery of the global economy, nations and value chains will rely on the level of entrepreneurship to increase and lift new and existing organisations and ultimately whole economies. Never before in most people’s working lives has the entrepreneurial spirit been more important for organisations to survive, innovate, explore opportunities and thrive through the down-turn triggered by the pandemic and beyond.

As business leaders we have all spent time postulating what the next “disruptor” might be and where it might come from. A “game changer”. Something that will create for us a “paradigm shift” in the business ecosystem.  Well, COVID-19 has certainly achieved all those benchmarks, though with none of the desired upsides we originally had in mind for the concept! Whilst we believe its origins to be in China, the virus has swept at enormous speed across the globe with a consummate disrespect for international borders like a tyrannical version of the “invisible hand” first described by the renowned economist Adam Smith in his magnus opus “The Wealth of Nations”¹. Only this time, it was acting with malicious intent, toppling corporate empires as it went leaving behind it a wake of destruction and uncertainty in the economy. For most organisations demand has dried up as customers tighten their belts, operations have been suspended as they go into lockdown, people have been furloughed or lost forever to the job market, the supply base is falling into terminal disrepair and the best laid strategies, plans and aspirations of corporate executives in every sector lay in tatters before their eyes.