Blue Ocean Shift

The first component is adopting a blue ocean perspective, so that you expand your horizons and shift your understanding of where opportunity resides.

You can: • Offer a breakthrough solution for an industry’s existing problem. • Redefine an industry’s existing problem and solve it. • Identify and solve a brand-new problem or seize a brand-new opportunity.

But when we asked them to articulate how their offering provided a quantum leap in buyer value, compared to the available alternatives, it became clear that, from the buyers’ point of view, it was actually quite similar and should be plotted as a high settler.

HealthMedia, is another—a struggling company in 2006, with a mere US$6 million in sales—which, under Ted Dacko’s leadership, created the new market space of digital health coaching and in two short years was sold to Johnson & Johnson for US$185 million.

pioneered a new strategy that opened up a new value-cost frontier through a step change in the kind and degree of value offered.

CitizenM Hotels, the affordable luxury chain, is one of these. It is currently expanding globally from its home base in Amsterdam and enjoys among the highest guest satisfaction ratings in the field of hospitality while having the lowest costs.

Stress to the group that the objective is not to create a portfolio dominated by pioneers. It is to create a healthy balance between today’s businesses—your settlers that provide cash and a measure of earnings stability—and the pioneers that are the growth engines for tomorrow. This is the path to profitable growth.

How do you go about identifying the ocean of noncustomers to create new demand? How can you systematically redefine market boundaries to open up a new value-cost frontier that makes the competition irrelevant?

Has a business that was once a pioneer, generating huge profits and growth, recently become a settler, suggesting that the organization’s growth is likely to slow if another pioneer is not launched?