Dr Simon Haslam Visiting Fellow Durham Business School and Certified Management Consultant

1. Blue Ocean Thinking:a fresh approach to business strategy Dr Simon Haslam Visiting Fellow Durham Business School and Certified Management Consultant

2. The story so far… ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ by Kim and Mauborgne published in 2005 based on research into over 150 strategic moves (30 industries) Focussed on the creation of freedom from competition (away from the red ocean) Blue Ocean ‘movement’ developed around the application of the tools/concepts.

4. Our aim To share two Blue Ocean tools and approaches that I’ve found useful with my clients over the past three years. - strategy canvas - four actions framework To encourage you to think about your business strategy from a different perspective

5. Strategy Canvas Captures the essence of a business model/recipe in one diagram. Acts as a focus for strategic discussion and exploration

6. Strategy Canvas - example

7. Strategy Canvas - how Agree the key factors that account for the shape of the product/service and reflect where the organisation places its energy (business model) Position these along the x-axis Calibrate the y-axis (low to high) by defining what you mean by ‘high’ for each factor (when positioning price, ‘high’ = high price) Plot the profile of the product/service to create a ‘value curve’ for the current offer

8. Strategy Canvas - note You can base this initial canvas on an industry sector or on your own organisation You can show/compare to competitors’ business models You can create new profiles/value curves around where you might take your organisation (future direction)

9. Four Actions framework Re-shaping the value curve results from the consideration of four actions ‘Raise’ means increasing the strength of a existing factor ‘Reduce’ means reducing the prominence of an existing factor (cost saving) ‘Create’ means introducing a new factor to your recipe. ‘Eliminate’ means making a factor in your current recipe redundant (cost saving)

10. Red ocean?

11. Nintendo’s ‘blue ocean’ response

12. Blue Ocean thinking Existing customers will help you improve, but only along your current trajectory - and that may be a direction of diminishing returns. Existing customers are unlikely to be catalyst of innovation Non-customers and why non-customers don’t buy may be a more fruitful ideas source Gravitate towards volume/scale solutions (Lord Sugar)

13. Blue Ocean observations The organisation needs strategic freedom in order to apply Blue Ocean ideas The strongest enablers of blue ocean opportunity are technological advancement, market re-structuring and changes in customer need. In more complex situations (public and third sectors) design the canvas using key stakeholders rather than just customers Changes to a canvas have consequences – recipes need to be crafted with as much foresight around these as possible The ‘scaling question’ (on a scale of 1 to 10, where…) is helpful in data generation

14. Third sector canvas - example

15. Your business?

16. Next steps Read the book Become Blue Ocean connected – website, LinkedIn group, management development @ INSEAD Look at you own organisation’s strategy through a different lens… … the current environment seas red oceans becoming redder. Simon Haslam simon@consult.co.uk

17. Blue Ocean Thinking:a fresh approach to business strategy Dr Simon Haslam Visiting Fellow Durham Business School and Certified Management Consultant