Who's Working On Your Blue Ocean Strategy?
Are your margins under pressure?
Are you fighting competitors for the same customers, mainly on price?
Do you have too many or too few ideas on how to break away from the competition?
With Blue Ocean Strategy, organisations avoid overcrowded markets and excessive competition by identifying and creating uncontested market space of their own. We work with your team to create products, services and market spaces where competition becomes irrelevant.
The Philosophy
Don't Just Compete,
Create a Market
From an early age we're all taught to compete. Competition isn't wrong, it's just a zero sum game; when one wins, another loses. But many businesses have created their own unique market space where competition becomes irrelevant, or at least far less cutthroat.
Blue Ocean Strategy shows you what they did, and how to replicate it in your business, in your industry and geography, with your team. It's not just for large incumbents or start-ups, and even not-for-profits benefit from Blue Ocean Strategy. It's time to add category and demand creation skills to your competitive strengths.
Learn more about the methodology"The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition."
W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne
Creators of Blue Ocean Strategy
We understand what you're dealing with
Large Organisations
We understand the complexities of aligning and committing a large and professional leadership group to a new strategic direction. We know how the noise of competing priorities, entrenched assumptions, and internal politics can stall even the most important initiatives. We help leadership teams move from strategic overwhelm to a direction they have genuinely built together and are committed to acting on.
See our approachGrowth Businesses
We understand the pressure of choosing the right direction before your resources get locked into the wrong one. We know how easy it is to keep optimising a model that is working for now but may not survive the next wave of competition and that however critical pivoting is, it's never easy. We help growth businesses find the market spaces where their specific assets and capabilities give them the most sustainable advantage.
See our approachBoards & Investors
We understand what genuine market differentiation looks like, where it creates lasting value, and where it is merely noise. We know that the hardest governance questions are not about whether the strategy is ambitious. They're about whether the organisation is properly positioned to create and capture value that competitors cannot easily replicate.
See our approachOur Services
Workshops and Programmes
Facilitated Blue Ocean Strategy sessions from a half-day executive introduction to multi-month embedded programmes. Customised for teams of any size. We have found that the most powerful results often come from longer-form programmes where the strategy is not simply announced. It emerges.
Explore WorkshopsFractional Strategy Advisory
We provide fractional staff for ongoing or ad hoc access to strategic thinking embedded with your team. An ideal solution for organisations navigating significant change, competitive pressure, or growth inflection points, with a flexible model at a fraction of the cost of a full-time appointment.
Explore AdvisoryOur Frameworks & IP
Including Competitive Strategy's Dirty Little Secret: The Sidelining of Comparative Advantage
We primarily marry three strategic planning methods: Comparative Commitment, Blue Ocean Strategy and Emergent Strategy.
The first is our own proprietary process that aligns your team on the competitive and comparative advantages of your organisation.
The second is Blue Ocean Strategy. Over nearly 20 years of practice we have refined the original linear application of tools and frameworks, to a more sophisticated acknowledgment of our clients' different starting points, and the cyclical nature of research, testing, piloting, refining and scaling.
The third is Emergent Strategy principles that allow strategies to evolve as customers and competitors react and our clients respond in turn.
Important to our unique approach is our understanding of comparative advantages when it comes to organisational strategy. Over 40 years ago, academics and practitioners made a conscious choice to focus the language of organisational strategy on Competitive Advantage, and sidelined the concept of Comparative Advantage. We have not.
Comparative Commitment is the framework we built to re-surface distinctions that have been lost.
Trusted by organisations across Australia and beyond
Client Impact
Andrew's Blue Ocean thinking completely reframed how our leadership team approached our five-year strategy. Instead of fighting harder in a shrinking market, we found an entirely new direction that our competitors simply couldn't follow.
— Chief Strategy Officer
ASX-listed Healthcare Organisation
The workshop cut through months of circular debate. We left with a strategic direction we had genuinely built together and were committed to executing. That alignment alone was worth the engagement.
— Managing Director
National Professional Services Firm
What differentiates Blue Ocean Strategy Australia is that they stay with you through implementation, not just the ideation phase. The Comparative Commitment framework in particular gave us a language for decisions we'd been struggling to articulate for years.
— Board Director
Growth Business