We have excellent prospects for internal and external growth, a flexible business model a competitive cost of capital and a fantastic cohesive team dedicated to delivering value for stakeholders.

FORBES: Ventas Is A Dose Of Stability In Health Care REITs

Crucially, the European social model also enjoyed an amazingly low degree of external competition.

ECONOMIST: European politics

The only possible line of compromise would be if the government accepted something like the Scottish model, where teachers use a bank of external tests, which they set when they think pupils are ready and which they mark themselves.

BBC: School tests boycott: Deja vu?

While the agency model has given CMOs extensive experience in working with external partners, a much broader, more complex ecosystem is now required that demands much more than a basic client-vendor relationship.

FORBES: Building Your Customer Engagement Ecosystem

My friend, the late Ron Morris (founder of The American Entrepreneur radio show) often told me that when he was considering whether to invest in a start-up, he would look at three things: the business model, the quality of the entrepreneur himself, and the external market.

FORBES: When Investing, Why I Pick Countries Over Companies

ClearStory Data, a startup that has not revealed its capabilities, has declared that it will be in the business of providing a platform and user model that makes it easy and intuitive to find high value external data from numerous trusted sources and cross-pollinate this data with private and corporate data for fast, richer analysis.

FORBES: Do You Suffer from the Data Not Invented Here Syndrome?

As the first step towards the commercialization of its new CMOS image sensors, Sony has developed a model with built-in signal processing functionality, an element that usually requires external embedment.

ENGADGET: Sony's new cameraphone CMOS jams bigger gear into the same space (video)