Boston Consulting Group developed the Boston matrix in the early 1970s.
It is a tool for clarifying how resources are best spent on the company's products to achieve the highest revenue. A company must continuously look at how its business areas are doing.
A business area is also called an SBU, which stands for the Strategic Business Unit, which is an area of products that have independent management and marketing. The model is part of a portfolio analysis, which means analysing the company's products. The Boston matrix is well suited to looking at how these business areas are doing in the company's overall product offering to see if some products need more marketing or whether there are product groups that should go out of the range.