Market conditions

By B.J. Richards.

Several months ago, I was talking with a gentleman in the fitness industry who excitedly told me about an app he’s working on. Its purpose is to encourage friendships among his gym’s members, presumably in the interest of building brand loyalty. Among the app’s many features, it will send you notifications throughout the day when someone from your favorite fitness class is nearby, “so you could maybe get together and grab a coffee or something.”

By Fiona Czerniawska and Edward Haigh.

Like 48.1% of the people who voted in the UK last Thursday, we were profoundly shocked by the result. Living in the London bubble, as most of us do, we’d catastrophically and unforgivably underestimated the fears and frustrations felt by other parts of the country. There should have been–and now needs to be–a far more serious engagement around the question of how a small island in north western Europe adapts to the consequences of globalisation. 

By Edward Haigh.

Stockholm’s much vaunted start-up scene is having little direct effect on the fortunes of Swedish consultants, but its indirect effect could yet prove significant.

Not that Sweden’s consultants need much of a leg up at the moment: The Swedish consulting market, already the Nordic region’s largest, grew by a respectable 4.9% in 2015 and shows few signs of slowing. Cross the Oresund, Svinesund or Torne river bridges (connecting Sweden respectively to Denmark, Norway and Finland) and you find a starkly different situation.

But the presence of what many are calling Europe’s Silicon Valley within their midst raises interesting questions for consultants in Stockholm because of what it says about the willingness (or not) of a new breed of digital businesses to turn to them for help.