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.

How to implement blue ocean strategy? What are the organizational and management risks and how can a leader attenuate those risks to build execution into strategy successfully? The case "Blue Ocean Strategy Implementation: Real-life Learning and an Interactive Game" brings the implementation principles of blue ocean leadership to students, entrepreneurs, and executives alike in a comprehensive and effective way. First, it introduces two different real-life examples of successful and failed blue ocean strategy implementation. It sets the ground for learning key frameworks of blue ocean leadership for strategy execution: tipping point leadership and fair process. Aided by the accompanying lecture slides, the foundations of strategy implementation are taught in depth by addressing four types of organizational hurdles in strategy execution - cognitive, resource, motivational, and political - and how tipping point leadership allows organizations to overcome them fast and at low cost, while fair process builds trust, commitment, and voluntary cooperation deep in an organization. Finally, principles and concepts of tipping point leadership and fair process are applied through an interactive game, creating an engaging and lively classroom experience with deep learning. The interactive game is online, with professors receiving free access to it.

This case describes how Tongwei Group, a China-based global leader in both aquafeeds and photovoltaics, created a fast-growing new market for green energy and a model for sustainable economic development by integrating high-yield aquacultural ponds with water-based PV plants in eastern and central China, regions where utilizable land resources were scarce and demand for electricity was high and ever increasing. The Chinese government's increasing restrictions on coal-fired power plants to achieve its carbon emission targets led to the urgent need for green energy development in the country, especially in eastern and central China, where population and industrial activities are concentrated. Yet most solar companies ignored the pressing demand for clean energy in these regions because of the shortage of utilizable land resources there. Tongwei rose to the challenge by combining high-yield fishponds with water-based solar farms and rolling them out in these regions, overcoming the regions' perceived unsuitability for solar energy development. This innovative approach created a burgeoning new green energy market, which not only increased clean energy production in eastern and central China, but also multiplied income for fish farmers and the regions' tax coffers, providing a sustainable socioeconomic development model that addresses green energy objectives and economic development goals simultaneously. This case provides an illustrative example of ""nondisruptive creation"", a new concept crafted by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in their book Beyond Disruption (2023). By going into geographical areas other companies eschewed, Tongwei created a new market of profitable growth and a thriving new business without disrupting the existing solar energy industry.

In the realm of business, many people have come to view disruption as a near-synonym for innovation. But is disruption the only way to innovate and grow? And is it the best way? In an excerpt from their latest book, the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy suggest the answer is No. They argue and that the overriding focus on disruption has led us to largely overlook another avenue of innovation and growth-one that is at least as important. 'Non-disruptive creation' involves creating new markets without disrupting or displacing other companies. Presenting examples including Sesame Street, the men's cosmeceutical industry and smartphone accessories, they show that this approach has immense potential to create brand new markets where none existed before.

From nearly bankrupt to a franchised chain of 150+ clinics and growing, PetWellClinic: Shifting from a Red to a Blue Ocean shows the use of blue ocean strategy to redraw industry boundaries and create a remarkably successful business. Dr. Sam Meisler, DVM, MBA, found himself struggling in a red ocean of the veterinary care industry. Stressed out and nearly bankrupt, Dr. Meisler applied blue ocean strategy concepts and tools to create a new market space in veterinary care. This is an ex-ante case where blue ocean strategy was used from the beginning to build a large new blue ocean business while transitioning away from his struggling traditional clinics. The first PetWellClinic was launched in 2010 and there are now over 150 franchises sold. Embedded in the case are seven short videos featuring key people which may be used in the classroom. This case enables a rich discussion related to entrepreneurism, blue ocean strategy, leadership, behavioral economics, turnarounds, and professional practices.

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 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?

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.