The nature of corporate investing has changed, with a greater than ever focus on intellectual property. In this video, Steve and Bryce describe how an outdated accounting rule renders these investments practically invisible, making it difficult to tell the difference between the Knowledge Leaders who use...
The digital revolution has changed the economics of every industry in every region of the world, creating a growth engine for the last half century and inadvertently, a market anomaly by which highly innovative companies tend to deliver excess returns in the stock market. This...
One behavior demonstrated by innovative companies is a tendency to embrace change, to apply the tools of the digital revolution to drive innovation within companies that then permeates entire industries. One example of an old school company embracing new tools is Sandvik. Based in Stockholm,...
Garmin’s is one of those stories we used to see a lot: private companies made in the USA and spawned from the fruits of federal government innovation, in this case GPS. “In the early 1970s, the DoD (Department of Defense) began creating the Global Positioning...
Founded in 1992 to build sensor and measurement tools for factories, farms and mines, Sweden’s Hexagon AB is at work today fusing the physical world with the digital. By integrating hard data collection with software, mobile and cloud-based technologies, this Knowledge Leader uses the tools...
In our work studying Knowledge Leaders, there’s a common thread: highly innovative companies often exist at the intersection of global trends that demand intensive R&D efforts to solve complex problems the world has never faced before. Coincidence? We don’t think so. The global population is expected...
Internet retailers are a much-watched sub-industry in the stock market for good reason: worldwide retail ecommerce is predicted to generate double-digit growth each year through 2022, reaching total sales of $3 trillion by the end of that year, according to Euromonitor. For those of us...
Pilots used to say, “speed is life.” But things have changed, says former F-15 pilot Bob Edmonds, now of Elbit Systems, in a recent white paper. Today, “information is life.” Because for military pilots, lack of data can lead to spatial disorientation, or worse, fatalities....
For decades, industries worldwide have used toxic chemicals like fertilizers, pesticides and antibiotics that are harmful to people and the environment to drive profits. Denmark-based Novozymes is working to replace those chemical processes with enzymes, naturally derived proteins that initiate biochemical reactions. This Knowledge Leader...
For decades, the fashion industry has tried to explain the elusive magic of the Prada brand. “Some designers are seekers of trends, but Prada actually is the trend, season after season,” the New York Times Magazine wrote. And this summer, when Jeff Goldblum appeared on...
As we outline in our white paper, the semiconductor is the General Purpose Technology of our time. A GPT is a core breakthrough technology that performs a general function, and many applications are built on top of it, forming the basis of economic development for...
Some Knowledge Leader companies are born in a moment of disruptive innovation. From the start, they exist under pressure to change their industry or die. Such is the case with Swatch Group, a company scraped together from the remaining ashes of a dying Swiss watch...
This week, in Bubble-Like Stock Valuations Miss $3.4 Trillion in Hidden Assets, Bloomberg detailed how traditional accounting can make a company’s fundamentals “look a lot worse than they are.” In the article, New York University’s Professor Baruch Lev weighs in. “You get numbers which are...
If you don’t know the name Diageo, that’s because Diageo wants it that way. This Knowledge Leader would prefer you to know the names Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, Baileys, Captain Morgan, Tanqueray and Guinness, the group it calls its “Global Giants,” representing 41% of the firm’s...
“Subscribers Are the New, New Thing in Business” declared The Economist (April 11, 2018). The magazine says that “Subscription models are seen by many investors and executives as the holy grail, because they promise a recurring stream of revenue…. The attractions of subscription businesses are obvious. Firms...
