W. Chan Kim
Co-Founder and Co-Director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute
The Boston Consulting Group Bruce D. Henderson Chair Professor of Strategy and International Management at INSEAD, France
Main Topics:
- Business Management
- Corporate Strategy
- International Business Development
- Managing Multinationals
- Value Innovation
Professional Profile:
Prior to joining INSEAD, he was a professor at the University of Michigan Business School, USA.
Leading Strategy and Management Expert
He has served as a board member as well as an advisor for a number of multinational corporations in Europe, the U.S. and Pacific Asia. He is an advisory member for the European Union and is the Country Advisor to Malaysia. He was born in Korea.
Kim is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum.
His Harvard Business Review articles, co-authored with Renée Mauborgne, are worldwide bestsellers and have sold over half a million reprints. Their Value Innovation and Fair Process articles were selected as among the best classic articles ever published in Harvard Business Review. They have co-authored articles in The Wall Street Journal, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The New York Times, The Financial Times and The Asian Wall Street Journal amongst others. Kim 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.
The Journal of International Management recognizes Kim as one of the world’s most influential academic journal authors in global strategy. He is the co-author of Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (Harvard Business School Press, 2005). Blue Ocean Strategy has become an “International Bestseller,” after reaching the “Wall Street Journal Bestseller,” “BusinessWeek Bestseller,” and “National (American) Bestseller” status. It sold over one million copies in the first year and is being published in 41 languages, breaking HBSP’s historical record of most foreign language translations ever achieved. Blue Ocean Strategy won the Best Business Book of 2005 Prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair. It was also selected as the number one Strategy Book of 2005 by Strategy + Business, Booz Allen & Hamilton’s leading business magazine, and as a Top Ten Business Book of 2005 by Amazon.com.
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 six principles that every company can use to successfully formulate and execute blue ocean strategies. The primary concept is simple: Blue Oceans represent unknown, uncreated market space. They become wide open opportunities once discovered and executed.
Don’t Compete with Rivals – Make Them Irrelevant
Kim is a 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. Thinkers 50, the global ranking of management gurus, places Kim among the top ten most influential thinkers in 2007. L’Expansion also named Kim along with his colleague Renee Mauborgne as “the number one gurus of the future”. The Sunday Times (London) called them “two of Europe’s brightest business thinkers. Kim and Mauborgne provide a sizeable challenge to the way managers think about and practice strategy”. The Observer called Kim and Mauborgne, “the next big gurus to hit the business world”.
Kim co-founded the Blue Ocean Strategy Network (BOSN), a global community of practice on the Blue Ocean Strategy family of concepts that they created. BOSN embraces academics, consultants, executives, and government officers.
Brief: The primary concept of the Blue Ocean Strategy 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.
Selected Works:
- W. Chan Kim, R. Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, Harvard Business School Press, 2005
- W. Chan Kim, R. Mauborgne, Tipping Point Leadership, Harvard Business Review, 2003
- W. Chan Kim, R. Mauborgne, Charting Your Company’s Future, Harvard Business Review, 2002
Associated Partner
Associated Partner
