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.

Webtoon Entertainment, a subsidiary of Korea's dominant search engine, Naver, with over 60% of the market share, is a prime example of how a company creates and captures new market opportunities in the era of digital transformation. With its humble beginning as a free service to increase user traffic to the portal site by providing digitized comics for web surfers, Webtoon Entertainment reinvented the comic book industry by changing the way comics are created, distributed, and consumed. Briefly, Webtoon Entertainment is a platform that connects creators and users of digital comic content in the form of a vertical layout that is optimized for PC and mobile browsing. The company now boasts 82 million monthly active users on its digital comic platform across the globe. The case explores the key milestones of Webtoon Entertainment to show how the company transformed the comic industry and became the largest storytelling platform in the world. More specifically, it describes how the company unlocked new creative talents and built an ecosystem for webtoon business based on a platform economy, monetized the once-free content into a billion-dollar business, and then rolled it out globally despite cultural and language barriers. Finally, the case describes the challenges ahead that Webtoon Entertainment faces in the lucrative yet competitive comics industry. Interestingly, the case has multimedia materials, including first-hand interviews and infographics, directly embedded between the written content. Students are able to access these materials via QR codes and are visually stimulated while elevating their comprehension of the case. This will be a whole new reading experience for students that immerses them in the evolution of Webtoon Entertainment at a different level, ensuring an active and rich class discussion. The case is suitable for teaching innovation, entrepreneurship, digital transformation, platform strategy, and globalization strategy.

In October 2021, Facebook changed the parent corporation name to Meta and announced plans to build a metaverse, a 3D virtual world for work and fun. This case explores whether Meta's metaverse is likely to be a blue ocean utopia for people and society at large or some form of dystopia. It is designed to create a lively classroom discussion and dives into issues ranging from the difference between value innovation and technology innovation to the potential danger of Meta, already one of the most powerful companies in the world, expanding its unfettered influence and control even further across its already three billion users. The case challenges students to explore the social, economic, and environmental implications of Meta's proposed metaverse along with potential business models. The theory and tools of Blue Ocean Strategy are used in the analysis.

This case describes how the Chinese internet healthcare company Ping An Good Doctor created a nondisruptive solution for addressing a key challenge in China's healthcare industry: Seeking healthcare was difficult for many Chinese people due to the relative scarcity and uneven distribution of high-quality healthcare services. While the government and some internet healthcare market pioneers tried to increase the supply of medical resources in various ways based on the existing hospital-centered system, Ping An Good Doctor aimed to remove the part of unwarranted demand from over-crowded large hospitals by launching an internet healthcare platform to provide primary care services. The company recruited a full-time inhouse doctors' team of high qualifications to provide 24x7 online consultations, and partnered with other healthcare players to build a "closed-loop" system of healthcare services with fast delivery of medicine to patients' doorsteps and convenient access to partnered clinics and labs. Ping An Good Doctor has been addressing the needs of a vast population of Chinese people who are looking for high-quality basic care and health management services while creating a win-win between the company and other players such as hospitals, grassroots healthcare institutions, pharmacies, and independent clinics and labs. Instead of causing displacement and disruption in the existing industry, Ping An Good Doctor's has allowed medical resources to address market demand more effectively while lowering social costs, thereby achieving nondisruptive creation, a concept coined by Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in their international bestseller Blue Ocean Shift.

The case helps participants explore and understand the difference between value innovation, the creation of a leap in value, and technology innovation, the creation of breakthrough technology. It teaches students to identify value innovation offerings, how value innovation differs from technology innovation and their commercial consequences. The case also explores if and how patterns in value innovation remain constant across industries and throughout time. The case is designed to foster a lively classroom discussion driven by mini cases and exercises.

The notion that innovation is tied to creative destruction is embedded in the psyche of innovators and entrepreneurs, which is why individuals and companies instinctively focus on disruption in pursuit of innovation and growth. But is disruption the only way to innovate and create new markets? And is it the best way? This case explores the other side of market-creating innovation, what Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne call "nondisruptive creation". It happens when you innovate and create new markets where there once wasn't anything, so there's no displacement. Emerging from online gaming, esports is a new sporting experience where spectators watch professional athletes compete playing video games. Since esports is an entirely new industry, it does not disrupt an existing market. The case illustrates the evolution of esports from a game for individual players to a spectator sport, creating an entirely new market space where both incumbents and new entrants find new business opportunities, as well as the social and economic impact of nondisruptive creation by examining the externalities of esports on various industries and communities.

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.

In the year 2000, only 2% of women in India used menstrual hygiene products. Almost a quarter-billion relied on cloth rags and many rural women were banished to a hut during their monthly cycle. In these unsanitary conditions, 62.4% had experienced at least one reproductive tract infection, with the result that teenage hysterectomies were not uncommon. The lack of menstrual products was linked to a high drop-out rate from school, forced teenage marriage, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy and often a lifetime of subservience. Yet despite the severity of the problem, taboo kept it largely hidden. Indians did not discuss menstruation. Arunachalam "Arun" Muruganantham changed this by innovating a new business method: micro-factories where women produced and sold sanitary napkins directly to other women. The case discusses how he solved a previously unaddressed problem in a way that created a new market, overcame deep social taboos, challenged centuries-old traditions and bettered women's lives, resulting in the creation of over 3,500 small businesses. It highlights how enterprises can be economically profitable and a force for good. And why, contrary to conventional thinking, innovation does not need to be disruptive but can be based on nondisruptive market creation.

"The case describes how three INSEAD alumni founded a fintech company called Prodigy Finance and created a new market of international student loans by solving a long unaddressed problem in the finance industry. Lack of access to financing was a major barrier impeding international students' pursuit of advanced education outside their home countries, especially for those aspiring to study in "high-earning advanced degree programs" at top universities where tuition fees were steep and few scholarships were available. Traditional banks were oblivious to the burning need of the international student population as their practice focused on domestic borrowers and their local past credit records. The founders of Prodigy Finance challenged the assumptions of the finance industry by creating a lending platform based on a forward-looking and cross-border risk assessment model, thereby effectively connecting international student borrowers with individual and institutional investors. Prodigy Finance has so far helped over 11,200 students from 132 countries, who have borrowed more than US$538 million. The strategic move of Prodigy Finance constitutes an illustrative example of new market creation through nondisruptive creation, a concept coined by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, authors of international bestsellers Blue Ocean Strategy and Blue Ocean Shift. By identifying and solving a burning problem that had never been addressed before, Prodigy Finance created a new market beyond existing industry boundaries, unlocking and capturing a burgeoning new demand without challenging or displacing the existing businesses of the finance industry. This case comes with a teaching note and three short videos. The latter can be downloaded for free for teaching purposes from https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/

The background notes accompany the free online case "Indian Premier League: Innovation Without Disruption" (https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/IPL), a self-paced, interactive case that lets readers analyze the strategic logic behind the launch of Indian Premier League (IPL) using blue ocean analytical tools and frameworks. With visual aids and interactive exercises, the case explores how the IPL transformed traditional days-long cricket matches into a thrilling three-hour sports drama with Bollywood music and cheerleaders, and opened up a new market space - "cricketainment" on the pitch and on primetime TV for families to enjoy. Students and executives come to understand the IPL and cricketainment market as an example of nondisruptive creation, i.e., they did not displace or disrupt the existing sector (players, products or services). They were creative but not destructive of what went before, i.e., the domestic cricket league and other forms of entertainment. Applying Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne's three-step process, readers discover how the IPL unlocked a new market that was beneficial to both the domestic cricket league and the entertainment industry.

Nintendo languished in last place during the console wars of the early 2000s, with game industry analysts suggesting that the Kyoto-based firm exit the gaming console market altogether. Instead, Nintendo used Blue Ocean Strategy to redefine market boundaries, creating the best-selling video-game console ever, the Nintendo Wii. Targeting noncustomers, the Wii outsold Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox combined, until the market was disrupted by smartphones and tablets. Mobile technology targeted the same noncustomers, offering easy-to-understand games and controls, and Wii sales suffered. Nintendo initially responded by introducing a tablet-like console, the Wii U, a poor copy of the tablet experience that was a dismal failure. Stepping back, Nintendo again used Blue Ocean Strategy to "value innovate" with the Nintendo Switch, the only console to outpace the Wii in sales, and by moving into adjacent markets, working with businesses in which it held a minority stake to release the wildly popular Pokémon Go and other mobile games.

Many people have come to view disruption as a synonym for innovation. This single-minded focus leads companies to overlook an alternative path to growth: the nondisruptive creation of brand-new markets where none existed before. It's time to embrace the idea that companies can create without destroying - and expand the conversation about the problems they can solve and the opportunities they can seize.

The Universidad Privada Boliviana (UPB), the Private University of Bolivia, was founded in 1993. Not long after, in the late 1990s, civil unrest erupted with coca growers battling police in the streets outside the campus. Students and faculty fled, the prior President retired, and the University was functionally insolvent. Manuel Olave was hired as Rector (President) in 1999 to salvage the struggling school. Charged with turning around the struggling university, Olave realized that head-on competition would not help UPB thrive. Instead of benchmarking against leading universities, Olave formed a team to explore growth opportunities, using blue ocean methodologies like the Buyer Utility Map, Strategy Canvas, and Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create (ERRC) Grid. Based on insights from the blue ocean shift process, UPB made a series of strategic moves to capture untapped demand for higher education that was more affordable and of higher value for students. Two decades later, UPB is ranked the best private university in Bolivia, enrollment is at capacity, and the school is planning a third campus. The case comes with a first-hand video interview with Manuel Olave describing his blue ocean shift. The video can be downloaded for teaching purposes from https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/upb/ Also available in Spanish and Portuguese.

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.

The case reviews how the Japanese company Park24 reinvented the short-stay parking industry in Japan and expanded it over the years, establishing itself as the unchallenged market leader. Hitherto short-stay parking in Japan was largely provided as a public service. Shortage of land and the high price of real estate explained the severe shortage of city parking space was due to land scarcity and lofty prices of land resources. Park24 saw that the solution was not building gigantic multi-storey car parks but making parking lots available everywhere people went and accessible anytime of the day. Drawing insights from the convenience store industry, Park24 looked for small plots near popular destinations and launched a low-cost, secure and automated parking service called Times. Rolled out rapidly across Japan, it fundamentally redrew the landscape of the short-stay parking industry. Park24's blue ocean move shows how a nondisruptive market-creating approach can open up new value-cost frontiers, new demand and high growth. The case comes with a teaching note, a first-hand interview with Koichi Nishikawa, Park24 President, and lecture slides. The slides and videos can be downloaded for teaching purposes from https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/park24/

Self-driving cars are moving from science fiction to showroom fact, or at least to a car summoning platform. Waymo, the self-driving car division of Google, has ordered 82,000 self-driving cars for delivery through 2020. Cruise Automation, from General Motors, is perfecting their own fleet. Countless companies are driving full-throttle into the future. This case explores whether self-driving cars (autonomous vehicles or AVs) are a red ocean or blue ocean opportunity, and explains the difference between technological innovation and value innovation. It will prompt students to think about disruptive innovation and nondisruptive market creation, and why inventors of major technological innovations throughout history have often failed to meaningfully monetize their inventions.

Customers are gaga for Wawa, the restaurant / convenience store / gas station that inspires people to tattoo the firm's logo. Founded in 1803, Wawa morphed over time from an iron foundry to a textile mill, to a dairy farm, dairy delivery business, grocery store, then convenience store. Dark clouds descended with the 2008 financial crisis. As competitors converged on Wawa, management recognized the need for a new direction. After the CEO asked his executives to review a selection of business books, they chose Blue Ocean Strategy to redefine industry boundaries, shifting away from the red ocean of competition to a blue ocean of differentiation and low cost. By 2017 Wawa was the 34th largest private company in the US, with 625 million customers and sales of $10.5 billion. Wawa serves 222 million cups of coffee a year and 105 million hoagie sandwiches. Where the average 7-Eleven convenience store grosses $30,000-$35,000 per week, Wawa averages $116,000. It used Blue Ocean Shift to achieve breakout success and thrive for a decade after its strategic pivot. The case comes with a teaching note and firsthand video interview of Howard Stoeckel, Vice Chairman and former CEO of Wawa. The video can be downloaded from <a href=""https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/wawa/""target='_new'> https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/wawa/</a><br> It is also available in Chinese.

This highly engaging strategy formulation exercise allows participant to unlock their creativity through the systematic five-step process of blue ocean shift. We reverse the learning process of case method by combining it with a group exercise. Participants will formulate their own market-creating strategy first by actively applying the concept, framework, and process of blue ocean shift to one of the most competitive industries - the travel industry. Then, they will be introduced to a real-life case that challenged the travel industry's long existing assumptions and successfully opened new market space. In analyzing the case, a three-part video series walks participants through the same blue ocean shift process applied in their group exercise, which will reinforce their learnings from the exercise and enhance the understanding of the case.This case is excellent for running a half-day or one-day workshop on creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship.The case comes with a teaching note, lecture slides, worksheets, a one-page summary and a three-part movie based on first-hand research and face-to-face interview with the CEO of a Korean company who created a blue ocean in the travel industry. The teaching material can be downloaded from https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/blue-ocean-shift-exercise/ The case is also available in Chinese and Korean.

On 30 May 2017, Amazon shares traded at a record high - above $1,000 - surpassing the share price of Google parent Alphabet. Started as an online bookstore 22 years earlier, Amazon has achieved uninterrupted growth by becoming the largest internet bookstore, the largest online marketplace, a media company, and the most successful IT service provider. Amazon recently expanded into the bricks-and-mortar retail business, launching Amazon Books across the US and beta-testing Amazon Go in Seattle. As of May 2017, Amazon was ranked the world's most innovative company and the fourth largest company by market capitalization. The case explores Amazon's path to growth and its successes and failures along the way. Successful strategic moves include Amazon Marketplace, Prime, Amazon Web Services, and Kindle. Failures included Auctions, A9 Search Engine, Endless, and the Fire Phone. Identifying commonalities and differences among them, the case shows the causes and consequences of Amazon's at-once stellar performance and severe setbacks. It applies Blue Ocean Strategy concepts to analyze its market-creating logic for future growth. The case comes with teaching note, a one-page summary and lectures slides. Teaching materials can be downloaded from https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/amazon/ The case is also available in Chinese and Korean.

For several decades, the classical music industry has been in decline with demand down, costs up and profits shrinking as many orchestras struggle for survival. Against this backdrop, André Rieu and his Johann Strauss Orchestra stand apart. Instead of competing like all the other orchestras, André Rieu has reconstructed market boundaries between classical music and pop concerts, creating a blue ocean of vast new demand. Rieu and his orchestra have stayed on the Billboard Top 25 Tours list for nearly 2 decades, right alongside the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Justin Bieber. His CDs and DVDs have sold more than 40 million copies versus 10,000 copies for a top classical music CD. This case reviews the competitive practice of the classical music industry and illustrates how Andre Rieu gained insight into unlocking new demand by looking to noncustomers of classical concerts, and how Rieu reconstructed industry boundaries and created new market space, making the competition irrelevant. The case comes with a teaching note that reviews major concepts and frameworks of competitive strategy and blue ocean strategy in the context of the case and provides answers to the questions for class discussions. Additional case material includes a lecture slide pack, and two short videos, which can be downloaded for teaching purposes from https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/andre-rieu/ The case material is also available in Chinese and Korean.