For the past few decades, the scramble for competitive advantage in manufacturing has largely revolved around finding new and abundant sources of low-cost labor. But with wages rising rapidly in China and other emerging markets, manufacturers worldwide are under intensifying pressure to gain advantage the old-fashioned way - by improving their productivity.

Ever since Chinese companies began going global in force a couple of decades ago, their impact on worldwide business has been hard to overstate. By combining low cost with massive scale, and by taking full advantage of a huge domestic market, companies based in China have disrupted and transformed industries from telecommunications equipment to solar panels. Will that leadership continue?

In less than a decade, the mobile internet revolution has overtaken the digital revolution and is still accelerating. Mobile penetration is increasing, the costs of access and devices are coming down, and more and more people in both developed and developing economies are using the mobile internet as their first - and often their only - means of going online. Let's look at the phenomenon in Europe.

China Inc. might appear to be an improbable source of fresh management thinking. Its state-owned enterprises are, for the most part, regulated giants that are experimenting with Western management practices. China has yet to produce a world-class company like GE or Samsung, and outside the country most of its businesspeople are better known for amassing wealth than for innovative management ideas. Yet China offers more management lessons today than do most other countries.

Across almost all sectors and regions, companies face unprecedented disruption. The competitive advantages that once gave companies a defensible position - their product lineup, scale or legacy position - are no longer as secure as they were. Some upstart with a newer and more agile operating model will start taking market share - if it hasn't already.

Today, with increased marketplace volatility and the rising diversity of attractive customer segments, business models age faster than ever before - making business model innovation an important strategy for driving value-creating growth.

If one had to choose a single word to describe the M&A market in 2013, it would be disappointing, and indeed many market participants have used this very term. But the exasperated deal makers have had little time to cry in their beer - they've been too busy. The M&A market took off like a rocket in 2014, fueled by the return of the megadeal (transactions with a value of more than $10bn), which has been in hibernation for the last several years. The momentum of the first quarter carried into the second, setting up 2014 as a potential bellwether for the market's longer-term evolution.

When people think "robots," they often envision vaguely humanoid sci-fi-movie beings with strange speech patterns. But today’s state-of-the-art robots are a far cry from that outdated stereotype. And they are showing up for work.

For retail energy companies, managing data once meant nothing more complex than processing analog meter readings and customer billing information. However, the advent of the smart home, along with the wave of digitization sweeping the industry, is creating major opportunities to tap into an explosion of fast-moving, complex big data in compelling new ways.