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Here is a selection of recent research by Cutter experts you can access immediately. As a Cutter community member, you'll have access to every new piece of research on sustainability, technology, leadership, and industry, plus all of our timeless business and technology strategy insights. This includes more than 20 years of articles from our flagship journal, Amplify (formerly Cutter Business Technology Journal.)

Search our archives for a taste of all that's available once your subscription is activated.


Advisor

Building Ethical Boards Through Leader Character

Trevor Hunter
This Advisor explores how leader character can strengthen board governance and support ethical, effective decision-making in the face of growing ESG demands. It argues that traits such as courage, integrity, humility, and judgment are essential for directors to fulfill their fiduciary duties while navigating complex stakeholder expectations. By embracing character-driven leadership, boards can move beyond compliance to shape resilient, purpose-led organizations capable of long-term value creation.

Advisor

Raising the Bar for Nature-Based Solutions

Catherine Drumheller, Matthew Ling, Laura Lawlor
This Advisor introduces a practical, integrated methodology for evaluating the holistic benefits of nature-based solutions (NbS). It addresses the shortcomings of current valuation approaches — either overly simplistic or excessively complex— by combining qualitative and quantitative measures within a structured multi-criteria analysis framework. The proposed benefit-screening method enables decision makers to transparently assess NbS across environmental, social, and economic dimensions.

Advisor

A Simulation-First Case Study: Rethinking AI’s Role in Clinical Decision-Making

Joseph Farrington
This Advisor presents a case study from a major London hospital, showing how a simulation-first approach can guide AI model development in complex clinical settings. By simulating blood bank operations, the team assessed the potential value of predictive models before investing in data acquisition and model training. The simulation revealed that even moderately accurate predictions could reduce waste, especially when combined with optimized ordering policies. Beyond technical insights, the process fostered early stakeholder collaboration, ensuring the final model addressed real-world needs.

Advisor

Leading the Leadershift: Rethinking Transformation from the Top Down

Jeremy Blain
This Advisor urges leaders to move beyond surface-level digital upgrades and confront the deeper cultural and strategic shifts required for true transformation. By focusing on digital ambition, data-driven decision-making, and organizational alignment, it provides a roadmap for boards and executives to overcome inertia, reengage their teams, and lead with purpose in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Advisor

The Hidden Sustainability of Hydropower

Shannon Ames, Whitney Stovall
This Advisor explores the often-overlooked sustainability potential of hydropower — highlighting how long-standing facilities are evolving to support environmental stewardship, community engagement, biodiversity, and transparent governance. From adaptive river management to educational outreach and innovative turbine designs, hydropower is demonstrating its capacity to deliver more than just renewable energy.

Advisor

On-Orbit Data Centers: Mapping the Leaders in Space-Based AI Computing

Curt Hall
This Advisor, Part II in a series that explores the current state of on-orbit data centers, spotlights the countries, companies, and initiatives leading their development. From national space agencies to emerging start-ups, it maps the key players building space-based computing infrastructure — transforming satellites into intelligent, autonomous systems that can process data in real time.

Advisor

Balancing the Boardroom with Lead Independent Directors

Alessia Falsarone
This Advisor explores the growing importance of lead independent directors (LID) in strengthening board oversight, especially in firms with concentrated leadership or weak governance. The LID plays a key role in balancing power, fostering accountability, and enhancing investor trust — but only when backed by real authority and engagement.

Advisor

Embedding Purpose to Achieve Real SBT Results

Kelly Cooper, Neil Hawkins
This Advisor argues that many firms abandon sustainable business transformation (SBT) too soon, overlooking its proven financial, cultural, and societal benefits. Success depends on a Constancy of Purpose — an enduring, organization-wide commitment that embeds sustainability into strategy, avoids greenwashing, and positions companies to achieve lasting growth and resilience.

Advisor

Governing the Quantum Frontier

Guido Peterssen Nodarse, Jose Luis Hevia
This Advisor argues that to unlock the full potential of private quantum hubs (PQHs), organizations must implement centralized governance systems tailored to the unique demands of quantum ecosystems. These systems must coordinate diverse technologies, manage hybrid architectures, and ensure secure, scalable access for a broad spectrum of users. Without such purpose-built governance, PQHs risk inefficiency and fragmentation — undermining their role as key enablers of enterprise quantum innovation.

Advisor

Bridging the Board–Management Gap with AI

David Larcker, Amit Seru, Brian Tayan, Laurie Yoler
As this Advisor explores, AI is transforming corporate governance by narrowing the information gap between boards and management. With greater access to data and analysis, directors can exercise more informed oversight— but face higher expectations, new legal questions, and cybersecurity risks.

Advisor

7 Pillars of a Universal Carbon Accounting System

Enrique Castro-Leon, Katrina Pugh, Jose Zero
This Advisor introduces the seven essential practices of a cross-industry generally accepted carbon accounting principles system. It outlines how transparent, interoperable, and verifiable carbon accounting creates opportunities for market differentiation and presents a blueprint for a reliable, global carbon ledger that supports business accountability and climate action.

Article

Disciplining AI, Part I: Evaluation Through Industry Lenses — Opening Statement

Eystein Thanisch
In Part I of this two-part Amplify series on AI evaluation, we explore the impetus toward AI accountability that arises from tackling real problems in real-world settings. Understanding how AI can contribute, at what cost, and with what nth order effects in a given context requires rigorous socio-technical systems thinking.

Article

Explain Yourself: The Legal Requirements Governing Explainability

Rosie Nance, Marcus Evans, Lisa Fitzgerald, Lily Hands
As Marcus Evans, Rosie Nance, Lisa Fitzgerald, and Lily Hands explore, AI explainability is a legal requirement as well as a scientific challenge. Despite the EU and UK’s differing approaches in other aspects of AI regulation, both the EU and UK GDPR continue to uphold individuals’ right to an explanation of automated or semiautomated decisions that impact them significantly. The EU AI Act also provides a right to an explanation for individuals or organizations.

Article

Measuring AI’s Impact Across the Fashion Value Chain

Kitty Yeung
Kitty Yeung urges us to elevate our thinking and consider what we are trying to achieve — via AI or otherwise. She argues that the fashion industry has long failed to appreciate the imaginative journeys consumers are taking, journeys that weave together self, situations, social circles, and eclectic wearables. Destructive practices like fast fashion represent flawed attempts to address human complexity with incomplete information, cumbersome supply chains, and a narrow anthropology that undervalues consumers’ creative agency.

Article

A Simulation-First Approach to AI Development

Joseph Farrington
Joseph Farrington emphasizes the importance of evaluating AI systems against their end goals. In healthcare, where developing and deploying AI models is especially challenging, he argues for first modeling the business context and processes the AI will interact with — before moving ahead with development or deployment. This approach can be used to assess, in advance, whether a plausible AI model will provide the intended benefit. It can also be used to run alternative scenarios to identify what else might need to change for the AI to really work or what else might work better if the AI were in place.

Article

AI’s Impact on Expertise

Joseph Byrum
Joseph Byrum introduces a framework to help organizations plan rationally and prudently for AI adoption. One element is defining performance thresholds beyond which emerging technologies become economically viable. Another is assessing how AI and humans should interact across different business functions: some tasks can be commoditized and handled by AI, while others remain critical differentiators under human responsibility, with hybrid possibilities in between.

Article

AI in B2B Publishing: The Promise & the Peril

Daniel Flatt
Daniel Flatt contends that an evaluation framework that promotes accuracy and objectivity is a commercial necessity. He points to B2B publishing as a sector of particular note: an industry built on credibility and accountability that AI could undermine, even as it offers opportunities to accelerate time to output. In response, new tools for detecting inaccuracy and bias in AI-generated copy are emerging, alongside collaborations across the publishing workflow and the wider industry.

Advisor

On-Orbit Data Centers: Enabling Technologies & Emerging Capabilities

Curt Hall
This Advisor series explores the emergence of on-orbit data centers — space-based platforms that enable real-time, AI-powered data processing and analysis directly in orbit. Here in Part I, we examine the enabling technologies, key benefits, and transformative potential of these systems for autonomous space operations, Earth observation, defense, manufacturing, and beyond.

Advisor

Stop Wasting Board Expertise

Siah Hwee Ang
Most organizations underutilize their boards, treating directors primarily as oversight agents rather than strategic partners. This Advisor recommends a shift toward deeper, ongoing engagement between directors and management to unlock the full value of board expertise. By institutionalizing both hard and soft skills — through regular interaction, strategic involvement, and better succession planning — organizations can ensure board knowledge becomes a lasting asset, not a transient one.

Advisor

Operationalizing Nature Positive Actions

Dan Salas, Caroline Hernandez
As biodiversity loss intensifies, companies face mounting pressure to integrate nature positive actions into their sustainability strategies. This Advisor explores how businesses can operationalize these efforts by leveraging established tools and frameworks to assess nature-related risks and opportunities. It also highlights the importance of third-party verification to avoid greenwashing and ensure meaningful outcomes.