The case entitled,‘Skype in the Voice-Over-IP Industry: A Commercially Viable Blue Ocean?’ illustrates the user experience of an avid Skype user who uses Skype’s voice and video offerings interchangeably for business and personal communication. The case illustrates the disconnect between Skype’s bifurcated pricing strategy and, along with the accompanying case exercises, prepares the participants for an engaging class discussion on what constitutes Skype’s unprecedented voice and video offering and how one could set a strategic price even though there appears to be no apparent precedents for such an offering. Case Study

The first part of two case series of Zappos,“Zappos.com: Bring the Shoe Store to Your Home” focuses on how Zappos reconstructed the existing boundary of online footwear retail industry with a distinctive value proposition that is neither an offline nor online shoe store in the conventional sense. The second part, “Zappos.com: Strategy Powered by Culture and People” focuses on Zappos’s people proposition, which led to high performance and raised barriers to imitation.
Case Study

The case entitled,“The Nintendo Wii: Lessons Learned from Noncustomers” illustrates that if companies wish to tap into latent demand and create organic growth, they must learn from noncustomers. Once Nintendo understood why these noncustomer groups shunned video games, they reconstructed elements across market boundaries to create a console based on simplicity, functionality, interactivity, with games that dramatically raised utility for these noncustomers.Case Study

The case “Salesforce.com: Creating a Blue Ocean in the B2B Space” describes a series of blue ocean strategic moves made by Salesforce.com in the CRM application market. In particular, the case addresses the concern of business executives over the applicability of blue ocean strategy in the B2B area. Salesforce.com’s strategic moves provide an exemplary demonstration of how a company can effectively create and renew its blue ocean in the B2B field by value innovating on the product, service and delivery platforms alternately. Case Study

“How Apple’s Corporate Strategy Drives High Growth” introduces the application of blue ocean strategy in the context of managing business portfolios at the corporate level and its impact on the total market value of a firm. The case examines a series of blue ocean strategic moves at Apple Inc. that transformed the company from a computer manufacturer into a consumer electronics powerhouse. Case Study

The case entitled, ‘Making a Blue Ocean Strategic Move that Discourages Imitation: The Case of Wikipedia’ illustrates how the alignment of value, profit and people propositions around both differentiation and low cost makes a blue ocean strategic move very difficult to imitate. Using the strategic move of Wikipedia, this case examines the three strategy propositions for the online encyclopedia industry and how key factors from one proposition can support and reinforce the other two propositions. Case Study

Creating a blue ocean. Cirque du Soleil entered a structurally unattractive circus industry. Yet, it was able to reinvent the industry and create a new market space by challenging the conventional assumptions about how to compete. It value innovated by shifting the buyer group from children (end-users of the traditional circus) to adults (purchasers of the traditional circus), drawing upon the distinctive strengths of other alternative industries, such as the theatre, Broadway shows and the opera, to offer a totally new set of utilities to more mature and higher spending buyers. Case Study

How a US Consumer Products Company Unlocked the Three Tiers of Noncustomers. This case and accompanying interactive presentation illustrate how new demand is created by looking to noncustomers instead of just competing for a share of the existing customers of an industry. Case Study

Lessons from Breakthrough Strategic Moves Over the Last Century. This case and accompanying theory-based movie examine three industries—automobiles, computers and cinema—that impact our everyday lives. How people get to work, what they use at work and where they go after work uncover patterns behind breakthrough strategic moves. Case Study

NTT Docomo I-MODE(TM): Value Innovation at DoCoMo. This case describes how, in a very competitive industry engaged in a technology race and strong price erosion, NTT DoCoMo has been able to achieve superior performance when it launched its novel i-mode services in February 1999. Case Study

Crafting Winning Strategies in a Mature Market: The US Wine Industry in 2001. This case and accompanying theory-based movie examine the US wine industry in 2001 and the strategic move executed by [yellow tail] that made it the number one imported wine and the fastest growing brand in the history of the US and Australian wine industries. Case Study