Renée Mauborgne

Renée Mauborgne is the INSEAD Distinguished Fellow and a professor of Strategy and Management at INSEAD and Fellow of the World Economic Forum

She has published numerous articles on strategy and managing the multinational which can be found in Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of International Business Studies, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and others.

Professor Mauborgne’s current research focuses on strategy, innovation and wealth creation in the knowledge economy. Her recent work, with W. Chan Kim, includes “Tipping Point Leadership” (Harvard Business Review April 2003) and “Charting your Company’s Future” (Harvard Business Review June, 2002). She is also the author of five worldwide best-selling Harvard Business Review articles including Value Innovation and Fair Process.

Her Fair Process article was selected in January 2003 as one of the five best classic articles on people and organizational motivation in Harvard Business Review. She is also a founder of the Value Innovation Network. Professor Mauborgne is a contributor to The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The New York Times, World Link, and The International Herald Tribune.

Her research has also been featured in The Economist, Booz Allen Hamilton “Strategy+Business”, The Times of London, Wirtschaftswoche, Global Finance, The Conference Board, l’Expansion, Børsen, Svenska Dagbladet, The Australian Financial Review, South China Morning Post, The Guardian Weekly, Korea Economic Daily, GESTION, Sunday Times of South Africa, Martes Fnanciero, People Management, The Business Times Singapore, Human Capital Magazine Australia, Panorama Economy Italy and others.

Professor Mauborgne is the winner of the Eldridge Haynes Prize, awarded by the Academy of International Business and the Eldridge Haynes Memorial Trust of Business International, for the best original paper in the field of international business

Her latest book ‘Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant’ co-authored by W.Chan Kim is "Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and thirty industries.

BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY provides a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant. In this frame-changing book, Kim and Mauborgne present a proven analytical framework and the tools for successfully creating and capturing blue oceans. Examining a wide range of strategic moves across a host of industries, BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY highlights the six principles that every company can use to successfully formulate and execute blue ocean strategies. The six principles show how to reconstruct market boundaries, focus on the big picture, reach beyond existing demand, get the strategic sequence right, overcome organizational hurdles, and build execution into strategy.

• Selected as one of the Top Ten Business Books of 2005 by Amazon.com
• Selected as #1 Strategy Book of 2005 by Strategy + Business, Booz Allen & Hamilton's leading business magazine
• Best Business Book, 2005 at Frankfurt Book Fair
• #1 Management Book of the Year, Jyllands-Posten (Denmark)
• Wall Street Journal Bestseller
• BusinessWeek Bestseller

 

Summary: The primary concept is simple: Blue Oceans represent unknown, uncreated market space. They become wide open opportunities once discovered and executed. Red Oceans, on the other hand, represent known markets. These are highly competitive, segmented, bloody, shark-infested waters with shrinking opportunities. Throughout history, markets are born as blue oceans and evolve to red through competition, commoditization and over supply. The goals of a blue ocean strategy:

Create uncontested space

Make competition irrelevant

Create and capture new demand

Break the value-cost trade-off

Align your entire system in pursuit of low cost, high margin

Red ocean strategies are self focused, obsessed with their organization’s internal perception of the industry condition, size of opportunities, competition, consumers and timing.

Blue oceans are about creating new opportunities, not creating new varieties of existing products, services or processes. Patterns can be identified and applied to generate innovative thinking. Based on research that included hotels, cinema, retail, airline, industry, computer, home construction, software, cosmetics, steel, auto and energy, common paths were identified for blue ocean strategies.

Innovation comes from seeing across industries, not competing within them. Using Southwest Airlines as one example, Mauborgne cited how they recreated the experience/expectation of auto travel in the air. Expectations included speed, low cost and high convenience. These are the points that Southwest focused on to differentiate their service and break away from the pack. In the process, a number of services that were industry standard were revealed to be unnecessary or a willing trade-off for a large number of fliers.

What you can learn:

• Why designated ways of building brands, doing publicity and running promotions do not work as they did before
• How customers changed their buying habits
• The revolution of the last ten years
• Goodbye to the social stratification of consumption: The global middle class buys for everyone everywhere
• Marketing at point of sale: The new architecture of information
• Why customer service expectations continue to change, and how
• E-commerce and its impact on consumer behaviour