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This case is excellent for teaching both MBAs and executives how to create a blue ocean strategy that is hard to imitate and sustainable. It focuses on Wikipedia versus Britannica.com in the online encyclopedia industry. The case teaches participants the importance of aligning the three strategy propositions of value, profit, and people around both differentiation and low cost to break the value-cost trade-off and create a blue ocean that is hard to imitate. Compelling firsthand video interviews with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia - along with other key executives, staff and volunteers, otherwise known as Wikipedians - bring this case to life in the classroom. It can be downloaded from https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/wikipedia/ The case is also available in Chinese.

When executives develop corporate strategy, they nearly always begin by analyzing the industry or environmental conditions in which they operate and the strengths and weaknesses of the players they are up against. They then set out to carve a distinctive strategic position from which they can outperform their rivals by building a competitive advantage. The underlying logic here is that a company's strategic options are bounded by the environment. In this structuralist approach, structure shapes strategy. But as Kim and Mauborgne, the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy, point out, history reveals plenty of situations in which firms' strategies shaped structure - from Ford's Model T to Nintendo's Wii. For the past 15 years, the authors have been developing this reconstructionist approach into the blue ocean strategy, which reflects the fact that a company's performance is not necessarily determined by an industry's competitive environment. In this article they explain the key differences between the two approaches, identify the circumstances under which each one is appropriate, and discuss cases of blue ocean strategies. The authors conclude by observing that most large and diversified businesses operating in multiple industries will need to learn to apply both approaches, depending on the strategic needs of their various units.

As of November 2001, NTT DoCoMo is the only company that has been able to make money out of the mobile Internet. This case study describes how, in a very competitive industry engaged in a technology race and strong price erosion, NTT DoCoMo has been able to achieve superior performance, with its novel i-mode services. Launched in February 1999, its i-mode service was an immediate and explosive success. DoCoMo came to exceed its parent company in terms of market capitalization as well as potential for profitable growth as we enter the age of mobile Internet. This case offers a value innovation perspective to analyze the success of i-mode with a particular emphasis on the business model used to exploit the i-mode innovation of DoCoMo.

The case entitled 'Lessons from Breakthrough Strategic Moves Over the Last Century' illustrates how businesses over the last 100 years have periodically broken away from the competition to create and capture new market space - often giving rise to entirely new industries. Yet, to date, there is very little understanding of the underlying strategic logic behind these breakthrough strategic moves. This case and its accompanying video examines whether there is a shared pattern across these strategic moves by examining three representative industries that touch peoples' everyday lives: autos - how people get to work; computers - what people use at work; and movie theaters - where people go after work for entertainment.

The case entitled 'How to Implement Blue Ocean Strategy' challenges participants to apply key concepts of blue ocean strategy implementation to overcome key organizational and management hurdles while leading a strategic shift. The case lays out how Braynesbridge Industries (BI), a fictional conglomerate involved in the steel industry, recently launched a new strategy to break out of the red ocean of bloody competition in the industry. The new strategy, however, represented a significant departure from the status quo, which led to steep cognitive, resource, motivational, and political hurdles in the organization. Hence, to implement the new strategy, BI executives had to overcome these four key hurdles. Despite this challenge, the case reveals that BI's management team successfully implemented the strategy fast and at low cost using tipping point leadership and fair process. BI's Board of Directors, very impressed with the new strategy and its successful implementation, is curious to learn the principles of tipping point leadership and fair process and how these apply to organizations.

The case entitled 'Crafting Winning Strategies in a Mature Market: The US Wine Industry in 2001' examines the competitive environment of the US wine industry in 2001, prior to [yellow tail]'s launch. The case demonstrates how the industry was overcrowded, highly competitive, and increasingly squeezed at the distribution and retail stages of the supply chain. Even though the industry was intensely competitive, wine manufacturers have systematically competed along the same set of factors that have hardly changed over the last few centuries. In July 2001, Australia's Casella Winery introduced [yellow tail] into this highly competitive US market. Small and unknown, they had expected to sell 25,000 cases in their first year. In fact, they had sold nine times that amount. By the end of 2005, [yellow tail]'s cumulative sales were tracking at 25 million cases. [yellow tail] soon emerged as the overall best selling 750ml red wine, outstripping Californian, French and Italian brands. This case examines the strategic move executed by [yellow tail] that made it the number one imported wine and the fastest growing brand in the history of the US and Australian wine industries.

The case entitled 'How a US Consumer Products Company Unlocked the Three Tiers of Noncustomers' illustrates how new demand is created by looking to noncustomers instead of just competing for a share of the existing customers of an industry. The case prompts the students to consider how new demand was created in the cell phone, computer and air travel industries by unlocking the three tiers of noncustomers.

This is the first of a two-case series. Cirque du Soleil very successfully entered a structurally unattractive circus industry. It was able to reinvent the industry and created a new market space by challenging the conventional assumptions about how to compete. It value innovated by shifting the buyer group from children (end-users of the traditional circus) to adults (purchasers of the traditional circus), drawing upon the distinctive strengths of other alternative industries, such as the theatre, Broadway shows and the opera, to offer a totally new set of utilities to more mature and higher spending customers. **ecch European Case Awards Category Winner 2006 and ecch European Case Awards Overall Winner 2009.

The Blue Ocean Strategy Implementation Self-Diagnostic is comprised of a series of probing questions that offer executive participants a practical tool for assessing the level of organizational hurdles that exist in their organization and the effectiveness of past and future strategies to overcome them. The diagnostic is divided into sections addressing the four key organizational hurdles (cognitive, resource, motivational, political) and one section on fair process.

The Blue Ocean Strategy Implementation Scenario Case offers a set of interactive group scenarios which are designed to deepen the participants' understanding of blue ocean strategy implementation principles. Using the four scenarios participants work in teams as they learn to apply key concepts of tipping point leadership and fair process. The four settings (health insurance, manufacturing, government, and banking) show how blue ocean strategy implementation principles apply at different organizational levels to overcome the four key implementation hurdles (cognitive, resource, motivational and political).

This is the second of a two-case series. Cirque du Soleil very successfully entered a structurally unattractive circus industry. It was able to reinvent the industry and created a new market space by challenging the conventional assumptions about how to compete. It value innovated by shifting the buyer group from children (end-users of the traditional circus) to adults (purchasers of the traditional circus), drawing upon the distinctive strengths of other alternative industries, such as the theatre, Broadway shows and the opera, to offer a totally new set of utilities to more mature and higher spending customers. **ecch European Case Awards Category Winner 2008**

The market universe is composed of two types of oceans: red oceans and blue oceans. Red oceans are all the industries in existence today; they are increasingly characterized by intense competition. Blue oceans are all the industries not in existence today; they are untouched and uncontested. To prosper in the future, companies need to go beyond competing; they need to create blue oceans. The issue is how to do so. Presents a set of analytical tools and frameworks that can enable firms to develop blue ocean strategies.

Despite a long-term decline in the circus industry, Cirque du Soleil profitably increased revenue 22-fold over the last 10 years by reinventing the circus. Rather than competing within the confines of the existing industry or trying to steal customers from rivals, Cirque developed uncontested market space that made the competition irrelevant. Cirque created what the authors call a blue ocean, a previously unknown market space. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In red oceans-that is, in all the industries already existing-companies compete by grabbing for a greater share of limited demand. As the market space gets more crowded, prospects for profits and growth decline. Products turn into commodities, and increasing competition turns the water bloody. There are two ways to create blue oceans. One is to launch completely new industries, as eBay did with online auctions. But it's much more common for a blue ocean to be created from within a red ocean when a company expands the boundaries of an existing industry. In studying more than 150 blue ocean creations in over 30 industries, the authors observed that the traditional units of strategic analysis-company and industry-are of limited use in explaining how and why blue oceans are created. The most appropriate unit of analysis is the strategic move, the set of managerial actions and decisions involved in making a major market-creating business offering. Creating blue oceans builds brands. So powerful is blue ocean strategy, in fact, that a blue ocean strategic move can create brand equity that lasts for decades.

Why are some companies able to sustain high growth while others are not? To answer that question, Insead professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne spent five years studying more than 30 companies around the world. They found that the thinking of less successful organizations is often dominated by the idea of staying ahead of the competition. In stark contrast, high-growth companies pay little attention to matching or beating their rivals. Instead, they seek to make their competitors irrelevant through what the authors call "value innovation." Conventional strategic logic and value innovation differ along the basic dimensions of strategy. Many companies take their industry's conditions as given; value innovators don't. Whereas many organizations let their rivals set the parameters of their strategic thinking, value innovators do not use competitors as benchmarks. Rather than focus on differences between customers, value innovators look for things that customers value in common. Instead of viewing opportunities through a lens of existing assets and capabilities, value innovators ask, "What if we start anew?" In this classic HBR article, first published in 1997, the authors tell the story of the French hotelier Accor, which discarded the notion of what a hotel is supposed to look like in the interest of delivering what customers really want: a good night's sleep at a low price. And Virgin Atlantic challenged airline industry conventions by eliminating first-class service and channeling savings into innovations for business-class passengers. Those companies didn't set out to build advantages over the competition, but in the end, their innovative practices led them to do just that.

When William Bratton was appointed police commissioner of New York City in 1994, turf wars over jurisdiction and funding were rife, promotion bore little relationship to performance, and crime was out of control. Yet in less than two years, and without an increase in his budget, Bratton turned New York into the safest large city in the nation. And the NYPD was only the latest of five law-enforcement agencies Bratton had turned around. In each case, he succeeded in record time despite limited resources, a demotivated staff, opposition from powerful vested interests, and an organization wedded to the status quo. Bratton's turnarounds demonstrate what the authors call "tipping point leadership." The theory of tipping points, which has its roots in epidemiology, hinges on the insight that in any organization, fundamental changes can occur quickly when the beliefs and energies of a critical mass of people create an epidemic movement toward an idea. Bratton begins by overcoming the cognitive hurdles that block companies from recognizing the need for radical change. He puts managers face-to-face with operational problems. Next, he manages around limitations on funds, manpower, or equipment by concentrating resources on the areas that are most in need of change and that have the biggest possible payoffs. He meanwhile solves the motivation problem by singling out key influencers--people with disproportionate power due to their connections or persuasive abilities. Finally, he closes off potentially fatal resistance from powerful opponents.

Unlike the traditional factors of production--land, labor, and capital--knowledge is a resource that can't be forced out of people. But creating and sharing knowledge is essential to fostering innovation, and it is the key challenge of the knowledge-based economy. To create a climate in which employees volunteer their creativity and expertise, managers need to look beyond the traditional tools at their disposal. They need to build trust. The authors studied the links among trust, idea sharing, and corporate performance for more than a decade. They explored why managers of local subsidiaries so often fail to share information with executives at headquarters, and they studied the dynamics of idea sharing in product development teams, joint ventures, supplier partnerships, and corporate transformations. They offer an explanation for why people resist change even when it would benefit them directly. In every case, the decisive factor is what the authors call "fair process"--fairness in the way that a company makes and executes decisions. The elements of fair process are simple: Engage people in decisions that directly affect them, explain why decisions are made the way they are, and clarify what will be expected of them after the changes are made.

Few companies have a clear strategic vision. The problem, say the authors, stems from the strategic-planning process itself, which usually involves preparing a large document, culled from a mishmash of data provided by people with conflicting agendas. That kind of process almost guarantees an unfocused strategy. Instead, companies should design the strategic-planning process by drawing a picture: a strategy canvas. A strategy canvas shows the strategic profile of your industry by depicting the various factors that affect competition. And it shows the strategic profiles of your current and potential competitors as well as your own company's strategic profile--how it invests in the factors of competition and how it might in the future. The basic component of a strategy canvas--the value curve--is a tool the authors created in their consulting work and have written about in previous HBR articles. This article introduces a four-step process for actually drawing and discussing a strategy canvas. Readers will learn how one European financial services company used this process to create a distinct and easily communicable strategy. The process begins with a visual awakening. Managers compare their business's value curve with competitors' to discover where their strategy needs to change. In the next step--visual exploration--managers do field research on customers and alternative products. At the visual strategy fair, the third step, managers draw new strategic profiles based on field observations and get feedback from customers and peers about these new proposals. Once the best strategy is created from that feedback, it's time for the last step--visual communication. Executives distribute "before" and "after" strategic profiles to the whole company, and only projects that will help move the company closer to the "after" profile are supported.

Identifying which business ideas have real commercial potential is fraught with uncertainty, and even the most admired companies have stumbled. In this article, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne introduce three tools that managers can use to help strip away some of that uncertainty. The first tool, "the buyer utility map," indicates how likely it is that customers will be attracted to a new business idea. The second, "the price corridor of the mass," identifies what price will unlock the greatest number of customers. And the third tool, "the business model guide," offers a framework for figuring out whether and how a company can profitably deliver the new idea at the targeted price. Applying the tools, though, is not the end of the story. Many innovations have to overcome adoption hurdles--strong resistance from stakeholders inside and outside the company. The authors conclude by discussing how managers can head off negative reactions from stakeholders.

Most companies focus on matching and beating their rivals. As a result, their strategies tend to take on similar dimensions. What ensues is head-to-head competition based largely on incremental improvements in cost, quality, or both. The authors, Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne from INSEAD, have studied how innovative companies break free from the competitive pack by staking out fundamentally new market space--that is, by creating products or services for which there are no direct competitors. This path to value innovation requires a different competitive mind-set and a systematic way of looking for opportunities. Instead of looking within the conventional boundaries that define how an industry competes, managers can look methodically across them. By so doing, they can find unoccupied territory that represents real value innovation. Rather than looking at competitors within their own industry, for example, managers can ask why customers make the trade-off between substitute products or services. Home Depot, for example, looked across the substitutes serving home improvement needs. Intuit looked across the substitutes available to individuals managing their personal finances. In both cases, powerful insights were derived from looking at familiar data from a new perspective. Similar insights can be gleaned by looking across strategic groups within an industry; across buyer groups; across complementary product and service offerings; across the functional-emotional orientation of an industry; and even across time. To help readers explore new market space systematically, the authors developed a tool, the value curve, that can be used to represent visually a range of value propositions.

While it is easy to recognize leadership in action, defining the essence of leadership is hard because it cannot be reduced to a set of personal attributes or particular activities. Intent on capturing the essence of leadership, Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne turned to lessons that Kim had learned as a youth in the temples of Korea's Kyung Nam province. These lessons dealt with the qualities that define true leaders. Their points were made through stories, not through statistics or research. Thus they provided the inspiration for five parables of leadership.