Business Strategy and Advisory
Businesses are operating in unprecedented levels of disruption and uncertainty.
Rapid technological change, geopolitical volatility and environmental and resource constraints are reshaping competitiveness and how value is created. Traditional approaches to strategy and leadership are no longer sufficient. Success now depends on the ability not just to respond to change, but to navigate uncertainty and actively shape the market conditions that will determine long-term competitive advantage.
What we do
We equip businesses and senior decision-makers to build resilience, lead market-wide change, act under pressure, make decisions under uncertainty, and translate strategy into execution. Our work has a strong future focus on the nexus between technology, geopolitics, environmental pressures, resources constraints and increasing social polarisation. We do this by:
- Turning Transition Strategy into enterprise value: CISL helps senior leaders turn ambition into investable, board-ready decisions. We build quantified transition pathways that link systemic disruption, from climate and energy to geopolitics and regulation, directly to enterprise value, enabling more confident capital allocation under uncertainty.
- Developing commercial transition strategy: CISL works with businesses to navigate disruption and turn uncertainty into a source of competitive advantage. We work with businesses to develop a clear future positioning, managing revenue risk, and building a practical roadmap for innovation and commercial success.
- Enabling better organisational decision making under uncertainty: We bring together fragmented risk insights across climate, geopolitics, markets and operations, into an integrated view of enterprise risk, and equip organisations with the frameworks and decision intelligence needed to act with confidence.
Our impact
Each year, CISL works with over 600 organisations globally who want to do better business, to ensure they can compete in today’s markets whilst building the industries of the future. You can find out how we are doing this by viewing our recent case studies, or reading our 2025 impact report.
Why work with us
For over 35 years, we have worked with businesses and finance to address the most important sustainability challenges and create value for future competitiveness.
- Impact: We are an impact-led not-for-profit Institute of the University of Cambridge.
- Thought leadership: We use on leading-edge business and academic research to develop business approaches to driving resilience and value.
- Connectivity: We have unparalleled access to business and policy leaders, innovators and academics.
- Network: We work with our global network of over 40,000 leaders and industry practitioners to build practical and actionable approaches for business to create value and resilience.
- Global influence: We have offices and hubs in the UK, Brussels, South Africa, Singapore and Australia, and deliver programmes globally.
