Monitor Institute’s mission is to help innovative leaders develop and achieve sustainable solutions to significant social and environmental problems. We do this in three ways:

• We are part consulting firm, drawing on the talents of our own dedicated team and the resources of the global professional services firm, Monitor. We advise innovative leaders of organizations and networks who are interested in pushing the frontier of practice and have high aspirations for maximizing their impact.

• We are part think tank, analyzing and anticipating important shifts in the rapidly changing context that leaders must navigate. We work to understand emerging trends and to identify promising new approaches and innovations in practice.

• We are part incubator of new approaches, designing experiments that identify high-potential opportunities and overcome key barriers to impact. We work with clients and partners to test and prove new models that hold promise for improving existing systems for solving public problems and for producing meaningful social and environmental impact.

Like many of the leaders we work with, we believe many of the best solutions for the future are going to be created by novel combinations of people, structures, and ideas. And that’s how we’ve set ourselves up:

• We have deep expertise and networks in the social sector, philanthropy, and social investing—and we firmly believe that enduring solutions will require the unique capabilities of government and business as well as non-profits and citizens. Our “industry” is social change. We work for a world in which new approaches to problem solving and new applications of existing solutions are developed and implemented on a large scale, capitalizing on the strengths and resources of multiple actors from the social sector, business, and government.
  

• We are generalists, in that we possess a deep grounding in the basics of strategy, organizations, management, facilitation, and intervention—and we have growing expertise in the cross-cutting areas that meet the emerging needs of innovative leaders (scaling and growth, network effectiveness, market-based solutions, social innovation, impact assessment, and more).

• We are organized as a business in order to best leverage Monitor’s global resources without restrictions—and we operate for public benefit, aiming to advance our mission and to serve the global social-innovation community of which we are a part.

• We are headquartered in the United States—and our work is global, because few of today’s most significant challenges are confined by national borders, and every country will benefit from the best ideas, no matter where they originated.

• We are both an independent legal entity—and part of a large, global firm, allowing us to take advantage of both structures as we work with our clients and partners.