Keystone Strategy’s Digital Transformation Focus And Entrepreneurial Flair

Originally published in IvyExec.com in 2015. Below is an excerpt from the article: 

Richards, a former robotics engineer and software product developer with Silicon Valley start-ups, and Iansiti, his former Harvard Business School professor and advisor, saw the business opportunity, but also wanted to build a different kind of consulting firm.

Richards and Iansiti felt management consulting and economic consulting firms were underserving the tech industry, even as technology was on the cutting edge of business strategy and business model decision-making. According to Richards, “We felt it was fertile ground to bring a new set of skills to solve these problems. The basic idea was that we would need software engineering talent, econometricians who could manipulate data and draw insight from information in large scale, and traditional MBAs with business experience, business intuition and managerial skills. Combining these skill-sets presented a unique juxtaposition of talent that was not common at that time.” ­­

Today, Keystone is a strategy, data analytics and economic consulting firm with about 80 employees and offices in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. The firm also has a network of over 20 experts, including professors from leading business schools – Harvard, Stanford, MIT Sloan, Wharton, the University of Chicago – and experts in intellectual property, economics, Internet businesses and technological innovation, among others. Expert Susan Athey, Professor of Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business, is one of the world’s most renowned economists on Internet marketplace design, Bitcoin and digital currency. Co-founder Iansiti, head of Harvard’s Technology and Operations Management Group and chair of Harvard’s Digital Initiative, is an expert himself, brought in on some of Keystone’s most challenging projects.

Read the entire article here.