PA Consulting welcomes boutique strategy consulting firm The Cambridge Group

Based in Chicago, for almost 50 years The Cambridge Group has served clients across the consumer, retail, and healthcare sectors and are focused on successfully delivering corporate and business unit growth strategies, innovations, go-to-market activations, and pricing. It helps companies align their infrastructure, businesses, and resources to meet marketplace demand in a meaningfully differentiated way from their competitors. The Cambridge Group will further enhance PA’s strong growth and innovation strategy capabilities and provide PA with a new office in a major US hub.

PA is the only company with the range of expertise to deliver end-to-end innovation. PA accelerates new growth ideas from concept, through design and development, to commercial success, and revitalizes organizations with the leadership, culture, systems, and processes to make innovation a reality. For example, PA elevated the go-to-market and growth strategy plan for Green Boom, a start-up that developed a patent-pending and sustainable way to help prevent, reduce, and clean up oil spills.

Fundamental changes in consumer buying behaviours are transforming consumer goods and retail markets globally. To keep up, manufacturers and retailers must innovate – whether it’s sustainable products and packaging, creating breakthrough innovations, or just bringing new products to market faster. In a world where strategies, technologies, and innovation collide, the combined capabilities of PA and The Cambridge Group will enable clients to create competitive advantage by taking ideas through to development and commercialization and enhance PA’s end-to-end innovation offerings.

Ken Toombs, CEO at PA Consulting, said: “We welcome The Cambridge Group team to PA. The team bring valuable expertise in corporate and business growth strategy, go-to-market activation, innovation, and pricing, that align perfectly with PA’s end-to-end innovation positioning. Together we can create even more innovative growth strategy offerings for our clients.”

Jim Eckels, Managing Partner at The Cambridge Group, added: “We are thrilled to join PA Consulting, an organization we’ve long admired and align well with. PA’s unique ability to take innovation from concept to prototype to launch will bring our strategy recommendations to market in ways that create even greater value for our clients.”

Chris Fosdick, Managing Partner at The Cambridge Group, said: “PA’s reputation and focus areas tie in seamlessly with the capabilities that The Cambridge Group has been working towards for the past four decades. Together we can grow a market leading global growth strategy offering faster and more successfully as a combined entity.”

This is PA’s second acquisition in 2022. Earlier this year, PA acquired Dublin-based design agency Design Partners.

The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.