Launching something new
Shape the offer, buyer value and market boundaries before committing significant resources.
Who's Working On Your Blue Ocean Strategy?
Are you launching, re-launching or growing a new product, service or business unit?
Are your margins under pressure?
Are you fighting competitors for the same customers, mainly on price in commoditised markets?
Are you ready to stop trying to beat the competition and create uncontested market space instead?
Whether you are launching something new, repositioning an existing offer or growing a business unit, we help your team identify new sources of demand and create compelling market space.
Using Blue Ocean Strategy, we move beyond incremental improvements to shape products, services and business models that make competition less relevant.
17+Years in Practice
250+Clients Supported
20+Industries Served
1,000+Individuals Trained
15+Countries Serviced
When to involve us
Bring us in for your next important market move
The earlier strategic choices are tested, the easier it is to focus investment on a proposition customers will value and your organisation can deliver.
Re-launching an existing offer
Reconsider who it serves, what buyers value and where meaningful differentiation can be created.
Growing a business unit
Find demand beyond the existing customer base without relying only on price, promotion or incremental features.
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
Selected past engagements
Selected Client Impact
Different strategic challenges call for different forms of engagement. These examples show how BOSA has helped leadership teams move from an important question to focused choices, initiatives and action.
New product development
MLC
Financial services · Product and service innovation
The Challenge
Identify new products or services capable of addressing a projected multimillion-dollar future budget gap.
Our Engagement
BOSA facilitated a hand-picked, cross-functional team of 12 using Blue Ocean Strategy tools to uncover unmet customer needs.
The Impact
The team narrowed 103 insights, ideas and product concepts to four proposals for senior-executive investment review. The divisional CEO at the time described our Board facilitation of the final options as the best he had ever experienced, and the leading four ideas as game changers for the business.
Market disruption response
Ergon Energy
Essential services and utilities · Regulated-market strategy
The Challenge
Respond to established competitors, disruptive providers, fast-moving technology and uncertainty in regulation and strategic direction.
Our Engagement
BOSA coached an eight-person, senior cross-divisional team through a 16-week Blue Ocean Strategy roadmap.
The Impact
More than 30 viable initiatives were compared through BOSA’s Extended Litmus Test process, producing a complete strategy that painted the path through the upcoming regulatory changes.
Organisation-wide innovation
Allianz Worldwide Partners
Insurance and financial services · Global innovation program
The Challenge
Build collaboration and innovation across a newly connected global group facing commoditisation and technological disruption.
Our Engagement
A 25-executive pilot combined facilitated learning, live challenges and a digital innovation platform before scaling to a six-week competition.
The Impact
As the program scaled up, it involved 400 senior managers from across the globe. Four ideas received innovation recognition and funding from the Global Board, with many other initiatives progressed at country and local levels.
Operational improvement
Kinross Gold Russia
Mining and resources · Operational value innovation
The Challenge
Help specialist teams identify value across the interfaces of a complex, remote Arctic mining operation.
Our Engagement
BOSA delivered a three-month, multilingual hybrid program with two on-site visits, treating adjacent functions as internal customers and suppliers.
The Impact
Cross-disciplinary work surfaced improvements in handovers and communication, opportunities to trial technology, and new applications for expertise held in other divisions.
Enterprise strategy alignment
John Holland
Construction and engineering · Enterprise strategy alignment
The Challenge
Create a shared strategic framework while enabling divisions to develop and test their own strategic choices.
Our Engagement
BOSA prepared divisional strategy leaders with a common framework, question banks and workbooks ahead of the annual management offsite.
The Impact
A Strategy Trade Show gave leaders a structured way to examine draft strategies across divisions and provide feedback, with the aim of strengthening collaboration, buy-in and alignment.
Strategic partnership launch
Amplifon and Bupa Health Services
Health and hearing services · Strategic partnership and launch
The Challenge
Conceive and implement a partnership between a national hearing-services provider and a major health-insurance group.
Our Engagement
BOSA introduced the CEOs to the idea and worked with both senior leadership teams on the concept, introductions, planning and implementation facilitation.
The Impact
The partnership moved Bupa’s retail hearing services to Amplifon and supported service propositions for Australian Defence Force personnel, aged-care residents, Bupa members and their families.
These summaries describe past engagements and the client context recorded at the time. Organisational structures, operations and priorities may have changed.