Nickel, a French fintech established in 2014, aimed to provide accessible banking services to underserved populations. Their innovative 'bank in a box' concept, requiring only an ID, a mobile phone, and €20, was distributed through local tobacco stores in France, which are an integral part of French daily life. In under five minutes, customers could acquire an International Bank Account Number and a ready-to-use Mastercard debit card. Did any bank go out of business or downsize because of Nickel? No. Instead, Nickel opened a nondisruptive new market beyond the bounds of the traditional banking industry. With it, the once financially excluded won, Nickel won, the tobacco stores won, and importantly, no one was made worse off. Nondisruptive creation is a term coined by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in their books Beyond Disruption (2023) and Blue Ocean Shift (2017) to describe the approach of creating new markets without disrupting existing industries. Nickel's success led to its acquisition by BNP Paribas in 2017 for over €200 million. But beyond financial success, Nickel's nondisruptive creation also had a profound social impact, offering cost-effective access to basic banking services and empowering marginalized individuals. In 2023, the company still thrives, serving 3 million clients and expanding across Europe.

This highly engaging exercise is designed to give participants a keen understanding of Blue Ocean Leadership and how to achieve high impact at low cost while saving time as leaders. Participants are introduced to a scenario-based exercise focusing on the fictional company Dunamis, an American video game company, and its recently appointed Director of Development, John Kedge. Kedge's first challenge is to create and produce a differentiated and low-cost mobile game. But during the production phase, Kedge finds out that all his good employees are leaving. Turnover is high. People are demotivated. He has to hire massively and still keeps missing deadlines. Now Kedge is really behind schedule and getting pressure from his boss. The scenario-based exercise is an engaging way to learn how to apply the theory of Blue Ocean Leadership and its tools to achieve high-impact leadership fast and at low cost. The exercise comes with a Teaching Note and templates for participants to apply.

In 2011 Katrina Lake launched a new type of online retailing, Stitch Fix, a personal styling service based on a mix of human creativity and artificial intelligence, and grew it into a $3.6B company. Like many other successful retail businesses, it rapidly caught Jeff Bezos's eye. And nothing good comes when Jeff Bezos notices you and decides to compete. After a first attempt to challenge Stitch Fix in June 2017 with Prime Wardrobe, Amazon unveiled Personal Shopper in 2019, a new service that worked similar to Stitch Fix. Will Bezos do to Lake's Stitch Fix what he did to Barnes & Noble with books? Or will Stitch Fix be able to fend off the retail giant Amazon?

Retail had always fascinated Katrina Lake, the youngest woman CEO to ever lead a US initial public offering. But she couldn't help noticing that the age-old industry never changed. Brick-and-mortar retailers still competed on variety and touch-and-feel, while online competitors sought to differentiate through low prices and fast shipping. She realized that artificial intelligence and human beings -- in particular, stylists -- could be creatively leveraged to change the retail value proposition, create a fundamentally different and significantly superior buyer experience, and a differentiated and low-cost offering. The case describes how Lake turned a Harvard Business School class project into a $1.5 billion company, Stitch Fix. Stitch Fix provides a personal styling service, sending individually selected clothing and accessories based on customer preferences and constraints. Buyers receive the knowledge, creativity and style expertise of human stylists, combined with the benefits a top-tier AI provides. These are blended into a service previously reserved for the wealthy (personal styling), delivered directly to customers' homes, at a price point that fits their budget. Lake's Stitch Fix is founded and led by women, and has one of the largest female management and workforces in the AI space, if not almost all industries. As of 2019, Stitch Fix employs more than 6,600 employees, of which 86% are women. The case works especially well for teaching about women in business. It also looks at recent attempts by Amazon to jump into the blue ocean Stitch Fix created. This leads to an interesting discussion about the likely impact of Amazon's Personal Shopper service, inviting student input on how to counter Amazon's attack.

Charity fundraising in the UK was a deep red ocean when Comic Relief started. Costs were up and donations were down. To stand out from the crowd, organizations had to work harder at fundraising and marketing. Yet Comic Relief rapidly achieved 96 percent national brand awareness and has now raised over £1 billion without spending anything on marketing. Its flagship event, held once every two years, is almost a national holiday in the UK. The case reveals how Comic Relief redefined the problem of the charity-giving industry - from how to get the wealthy to give out of guilt, to how to get everyone 'to do something funny for money' - thus reconstructing the market boundaries. It understood how to create new demand by looking to nondonors and what turned them off (the blocks to giving). In so doing, it erected formidable barriers to imitation - cognitive, organisational, economic and legal. Its enduring success relies on the alignment of its value, profit and people propositions. It can be used to teach the following Blue Ocean concepts: (1) the Buyer Utility Map; (2) the Three Tiers of Noncustomers; (3) Barriers to Imitation; and (4) Disruptive versus nondisruptive creation.