Find uncontested market space, and make your competition irrelevant

Case 1: A major financial services industry body, which holds an annual conference in Australia each year, approached Blue Ocean Strategy Australia to provide an engaging keynote speaker.  Combining presentation materials, videos, table-based exercises and immediate audience survey tools, this was the most highly attended and best rated break-out session of the conference.

Case 2: A tourism industry body arranged for a Blue Ocean Strategy Australia consultant to attend their annual international conference in Asia.  Our consultant ran a series of short daily workshops for attendees, that culminated in a draft Blue Ocean Strategy for each attendee’s business and follow-up research and fieldwork to follow through with implementation.

Case 3: A Fortune 500 company operating in the Middle East engaged Blue Ocean Strategy Australia to arranged a 4 day executive team strategy, creativity and innovation conference in the Middle East.  A range of speakers, locations and activities where arranged that took the team members into different environments to explore and network with different businesses and expert, such as a start-up incubator, tours and meetings with complementary product and service providers and potential new clients and partners.  Topics covered included customer experience, competitor research, partnering, technological trends and personal healthcare and mindfulness.

This national property development and management business found its sales team focused almost solely on price.

They needed to re-focus their sales team’s efforts on other financial and non-financial features, but they needed the sales team to own it.

Bringing the team together we progressed them through a fair process of engagement that valued their intellectual and emotional input to the challenges they faced in the market, and their ideas on how to tackle them.

We aligned the team, awakened them to the nature of their common challenges, inspired them to explore for new ideas and solutions, and validated them in the market with research and field work.

By initiating motivated behavioural change, we were able to re-invigorate the sales teams efforts and get them focused on not only winning in new ways with newly defined differentiation, but also in searching for ways to increase demand by bringing new non-customers into the market, with new and insightful offerings, that in some cases also adopted emerging digital sales and marketing technologies that had been proven elsewhere in the business.

The CEO and Head of Strategy of this large and diversified Australian ASX listed business were concerned to ensure the leaders of its very varied divisions were aligned on key common issues of strategy and collaboration across divisions.  They also wanted to explore their sense of purpose.

At a corporate strategy offsite, Blue Ocean Strategy Australia provided several accredited BOS facilitators working as a team, with each allocated to a separate division.

Portfolio maps were created for each division, highlighting the key areas of concern and drivers of expected growth.

The maps were shared and compared, particularly with a whole-of-business portfolio map developed by the CEO and his immediate team.

Strategic dialogues continued post the offsite around key areas of Customer Value, Business Models, People and Technology, further exploring, sharing and aligning views and identifying areas that required further and continued investigation.

In preparation for their annual strategic planning offsite, this national construction and engineering firm engaged Blue Ocean Strategy Australia to work with the CEO, Head of Strategy and Divisional Leaders.

The task was to firm up and clarify both business-as-usual and disruptive strategies, and expose the leaders to creative innovation methods of ideation, validation and execution.  This was achieved through a series of individual and group meetings in the lead up to the offsite.

At the offsite, after the usual round of morning presentations, the team adjourned for lunch.  But when they returned they found the conference space transformed into a trade show.  Strategies were displayed and shared with each division having their own stand.  This allowed all participants to engage in an educative, fun and creative, collaborative exploration and sharing of ideas, without the usual boring death by powerpoint strategy presentations.  It provided for careful contemplation and consideration, with questions and ideas captured in real time through verbal and written feedback.

This international logistics business brought 70 of its divisional leaders together for their annual conference.

Amongst the topics for discussion was of course strategy.

In a highly commoditised and competitive industry, regardless of where you look in the world, the Global Strategy Director was keen to expose the senior executive to new styles of strategic thinking.

Blue Ocean Strategy Australia was engaged to run a brief strategic thinking challenge for the 70 leaders.

Using the Strategy Canvas as the basis of the challenge, individuals working in small teams shared and explored common and unique issues regarding competition, regulatory environments, technological disruption, change management and operations.

After an engaging and inspiring conference, divisional leaders continued to expand on the use of Blue Ocean Strategy methods in their regions, and to share experiences and learning across the group.

Financial Services Industry – The Revenue Challenge

A major Australian financial services business came to Blue Ocean Strategy Australia with a challenge.  Help us develop a series of new Blue Ocean Strategy creating products to fill a multi-million dollar gap in our revenue forecasts.

The organisation had completed an extensive review of all existing and future planned products and services.  It had developed plans to extract as much revenue from these as possible by pursuing highly competitive but generally incremental product improvements.  This still left with a revenue gap measuring in the tens of millions of dollars per annum.

With a small but diverse team from across the organisation, over a period of 12 weeks, and utilising Blue Ocean Strategy techniques facilitated by the BOS Australia team, the client developed a list of over 100 ideas.

Using the Blue Ocean Strategy litmus test, these were refined to the four largest and most commercially viable.

By their own estimates, two of these four ideas had the potential to far exceed the identified financial gap on their own, while the other two had potential to meet or significantly contribute towards closing the gap.

After a series of internal roadshows to present, test and refine the ideas, a senior management group of approximately 20 people met to review the ideas, during which broad strategic and implementation overlays devised by the management group were applied and the organisation is now engaged in implementation.

The most common reaction from those exposed to the Blue Ocean Strategy ideas, was to express how logical, how obvious, and how potentially disruptive these ideas seemed in hindsight, with some disbelief that no-one had thought of them before.  A hallmark of good Blue Ocean Strategies.

Learn more about Blue Ocean Strategy:

• WEBINARS – Attend a webinar or listen to a pre-recorded one

• WORKSHOPS – Attend one of Plunge or Deep Dive workshops

Sometimes innovation needs to be focused on changing things internally, not just at end customers.

Usually it is to drive efficiency and continuous improvement.

This client operates in a remote part of the world and has many interdependent parts to its operations.

But each separate business unit was so siloed and isolated, and monopolistic (there were no competitors or alternatives to turn to), that although there was good social interaction and camaraderie, there was still opportunities for operational improvement.

Instead of applying the whole Blue Ocean Strategy methodology, such as the emphasis on non-customers, we focused on Value Innovation.  Looking up and down the production and value chain to find areas to improve understanding and collaboration around pain points.  The aim was to change the culture to treat each other as internal customers and suppliers.

With an Internal Value Innovation Program in place, the early improvements were strikingly obvious and significant.

The success of the program in one region has seen this multinational looking to expand the program into other operations and territories.

Learn more about Blue Ocean Strategy:

• WEBINARS – Attend a webinar or listen to a pre-recorded one

• WORKSHOPS – Attend one of Plunge or Deep Dive workshops