Strategy & Growth

Strategy & Growth
Mapping the landscape and building the plan that gives transformation a direction

Strategy & Growth
Disciplines

Growth is an organisational question. It touches how decisions get made, how teams are structured, how technology supports the work, how the market encounters the company, how new products move from idea to adoption. A strategy that treats these as separate concerns produces a plan that looks coherent on paper and fragments the moment it meets reality.
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This is where most engagements begin, and where they stay anchored throughout. Most of our work runs on a five-stage model: an opening period of growth analysis and planning, followed by an extended programme that turns the plan into structures, processes, technology, and new ways of working. Strategy & growth as a discipline runs through every stage, though it's at its densest at the start, when the picture is being formed.

Mapping growth

Our growth analysis maps how the organisation acquires, converts, and retains customers. How products reach users. How operations scale. Where the structural gaps sit between ambition and capacity. What the dependencies are between one area of the business and another.
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The bias is toward the commercial side, because that is where most of the gap between intent and outcome shows up. But the analysis follows the question wherever it leads. Sometimes that means looking closely at how a product team prioritises, how operations absorb new volume, or how leadership makes decisions under pressure.
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A familiar pattern surfaces early. Only a third of senior leaders can name three of their company's strategic priorities; another third cannot name a single one. Up to 20% of payroll in scaling companies goes to work that doesn't connect to actual priorities: duplication, misalignment, effort spent on the wrong things. These numbers don't appear in any internal report, but they're consistent across organisations once you start looking. Our Growth Analysis surfaces them.

01. Capital has gone selective

39% of biotechs entered 2025 with less than 12 months of cash on hand (EY, Biotech Beyond Borders 2025), the highest reading in six years. The IPO window has narrowed to a haves-and-have-nots market: 8 to 11 biotech IPOs priced in all of 2025 versus 30 in 2024.

Investors now fund discrete value-inflection milestones, not visions. The CEOs raising successfully in 2026 are the ones who have rebuilt their financing narrative around a sequence of binary, defensible milestones, and proved they can hit them on schedule.

02. Approval is no longer the finish line

Only 20 to 30% of first-time biotech launchers exceed launch expectations, versus 40 to 50% for established players (McKinsey Life Sciences, 2024 to 25). The gap between regulatory approval and reimbursed, prescribed, procured volume has widened under the EU Joint Clinical Assessment, IRA price negotiation, MDR/IVDR enforcement and payer consolidation.

In industrial biotech and AgBio the same chasm shows up between offtake agreements and ramped commercial volume.

The work that decides commercial success now starts 24 to 36 months before launch, and most companies still treat it as a post-approval workstream.

03. From first-of-a-kind to Nth-of-a-kind

Europe generates 27% of cleantech patents worldwide, but only 7% of those products reach the market (Cleantech for Iberia, EU Biotech Act consultation). The gap between a flagship plant and a repeatable, bankable, geopolitically resilient manufacturing footprint has become the single largest swing factor on enterprise value.

Sharpened in 2025 to 26 by BIOSECURE, US tariffs on EU and Indian pharma, the EU Critical Medicines Act, and project-finance investor scepticism about novel bioprocesses.

Companies solving this through licensing, project finance and disciplined capacity right-sizing will graduate to category leadership; those funding every successive plant from balance-sheet equity will dilute through 2028.

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What comes out is a growth plan. We structure the choices using Playing to Win, the framework developed by Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley. Five cascading questions: what does winning look like, where will we play, how will we win there, what capabilities must be in place, what management systems are required. The questions are interrelated, and each answer constrains the next.

The framework forces concrete choices. Not "we want to grow in Europe," but which segments, which channels, which propositions, which capabilities the organisation needs to build, sustain, or stop investing in. Nearly two-thirds of executives report that their company carries too many conflicting priorities at once. About half say their organisation has no defined list of strategic priorities at all. The discipline of choosing, and of choosing what not to do, is what separates a plan that holds from a plan that drifts.

Markets shift while transformation is underway, new information surfaces, priorities evolve. The cascading structure of Playing to Win absorbs those shifts without losing coherence. A change in market conditions changes the answer to where we play, which propagates through the rest of the cascade in a way that's traceable rather than chaotic.

The plan

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Strategy stays present throughout the engagement. The growth plan is a living reference, recalibrated as the work progresses and as the organisation's understanding of itself deepens.

The cadence of that recalibration is part of what we set up early. When the leadership team revisits the plan, what triggers a rewrite, how new information enters.In practice, this means strategy operates at a different rhythm than the annual planning cycle most organisations are used to.

The recalibration happens against the live programme, not against a calendar. It also runs faster. The typical lag from a new strategic idea to a funded line in the budget runs around 18 months in companies without an active plan to compress it. By the time those companies have committed to a direction, the conditions that prompted it have often moved on.

Over time

Strategy & GrowthMapping the landscape and building the plan that gives transformation a direction

More figures on where strategy slows growth in the strategy & growth section of the dashboard.

Strategy & Growth
Mapping the landscape and building the plan that gives transformation a direction