Practice areas.

Polis is a top-tier boutique New Zealand strategy consulting firm deploying a senior mix of professionals, around NZ with offices in Auckland and Wellington.

Our work is customised to our clients’ needs. We typically solve complex challenges and work with multiple stakeholders.

While primarily known as strategists, our work is often focused in five practice areas.

Corporate and Business strategy and performance

Deploying rigorous strategy methods from our training and experience in leading global consulting firms, we put top-tier strategy and value creation advice within reach of large and medium-sized New Zealand firms.  

We excel at customised, globally informed strategy and business performance advice that was once out of reach of most New Zealand firms. 

We typically operate in joint teams with our clients to ensure we work alongside, with and through our clients’ personnel.

Polis Consulting Group has deep global and local experience supporting boards and the C-suite across a range of disciplines, including:

  • Corporate strategy and performance – from setting ambitions to designing winning portfolio strategies and supporting implementation

  • Market entry analysis and go-to-market strategy

  • Disruptive industry strategy design, based on global horizon scanning in advanced technology and scientific domains

  • M&A / private equity analysis and support – identifying targets, conducting Commercial Due Diligence, value capture through Post-Merger Integration, and Vendor Due Diligence

  • Business model redesign and transformation for improving top and bottom-line performance.

  • Change management, aligning multiple stakeholders around evidence-based strategy.  We deploy both “hard” and “soft” skills to get the best results for our clients.

 We work across a broad range of industries, including infrastructure, financial services, manufacturing, technology, media, agriculture, and consumer goods and retailing.   We also support international clients with New Zealand market-entry strategy and stakeholder and regulatory management.  To give our clients the reach and insight they need to win, we partner with colleagues in networks across the globe.

We help clients successfully navigate fundamental changes in technology and the business environment, bringing to bear decades of experience in business, government, and international affairs. 

Never before has it been as “high-VUCA” (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) as it is today. Risks must be managed, and dynamic, adaptive capabilities developed to architect successful responses and take advantage of new emerging opportunities.

Our approach includes 21st century strategy practices and methods such as scenario planning and quantitative multifactor modelling techniques, big data analytics, ESG imperatives, and including the opportunities and demands from the wider ecosystem in strategy decisions.

Economic, industry and regional development

We are a leading practitioner of regional and cluster-based economic development in New Zealand. From our largest cities to our most deprived regions, we help our clients achieve transformational results through:

  • Evidence-based analytics and strategy development

  • International benchmarking and best practice support

  • Accessing public policy and resources, from the Provincial Growth Fund to post-COVID recovery packages, turbo-charging regional results

  • Aligning multiple stakeholders to build trust and achieve shared goals

We help clients build clusters of related firms and industries to achieve outstanding results by leveraging shared infrastructure, public policy benefits and spillover gains. Our experience is broad and deep, and recently includes:

  • Agriculture and horticulture

  • Aquaculture and marine

  • Tourism and related industries

  • Forestry and timber products

  • Transportation and infrastructure

  • Energy and resources

Infrastructure Advisory

We are engaged at the highest strategic levels across the infrastructure system. We support our clients navigate large and complex infrastructure challenges including: 

  • Evidence-based infrastructure strategy design and implementation

  • Infrastructure policy advice

  • InfraTech and digital policy and strategy advice

  • Global infrastructure research, benchmarking and engagement

  • Major project management and leadership capability development

  • Strategic alignment between economic development, infrastructure, wellbeing and spatial outcomes

Polis also has a significant network of senior partners in our alliance who bring expert urban development/regeneration, better business case development, complex modelling and big data for large infrastructure projects and alliances. Infrastructure is a powerful instrument to support human and environmental flourishing as well as economic development productivity gains if strategy and delivery are strongly aligned. Our group of senior experts have supported complex projects recently which include: 

  • Key advisor to the Te Waihanga, the NZ Infrastructure Commission on the 30-year Infrastructure Strategy for New Zealand

  • Maori partnership and economic opportunities in the infrastructure sector

  • InfraTech and digitalisation

  • Major regional housing and regeneration strategies and business cases

  • National and regional Spatial Planning

Innovation, digital and creative industries

For the public and state-owned sector we provide trusted innovation advice across the following:

  • Global innovation performance benchmarking and analysis 

  • Mission-orientated policy development and orchestration 

  • Organisational innovation capability diagnostics

  • Innovation policy research, design, monitoring and evaluation 

  • Innovation management and methodology development at institution and system level 

  • Design and delivery of major innovation pilot programmes

  • Innovation research programme design and evaluation 

We advise on mission-led innovation strategy that drives firm-level productivity and innovation. We support firms and policy makers to make the required pivots to evolve toward a more innovative, knowledge-intensive, and low carbon economy. 

Public strategy and Policy Design

We advise on public strategy and regulatory matters that drive economic growth, inclusion and wellbeing for Aotearoa New Zealand.

We bring strategic acuity demanded by top-tier corporate clients to complex public policy issues. We deploy a cross-disciplinary approach to our work, supported by rigorous evidence-based analysis and bespoke public strategy solutions. We support clients in tackling the most complex public strategy challenges across:

  • Physical and digital infrastructure

  • Economic development and job creation strategy

  • Industry development

  • Healthcare and aging communities

  • Environment and low carbon economy transition

We bring together customised teams of high-grade professionals to crack some of the toughest challenges facing public policy makers in the post-COVID era.

Here to help. Contact us.