SIX PATHS FRAMEWORK

The Six Paths Framework developed by Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne allows managers to address the search risk many companies struggle with. It enables them to successfully identify out of the haystack of possibilities that exist, commercially compelling blue oceans by reconstructing market boundaries.

The six paths framework provides six systematic ways to shift the lens you use in looking at the market universe and open up a new value-cost frontier. Path by path, the framework explains how to uncover plausible blue ocean opportunities by looking across an industry’s self-imposed boundaries, instead of remaining stuck within them.

This process enables you to break away from conventional competition-based thinking, shift your perspective and gain insights into how to reconstruct conventional boundaries to open new demand. Instead of looking within conventional boundaries, the six paths framework helps you to look across alternative industries, across strategic groups, across buyer groups, across complementary product and service offerings, across the functional-emotional orientation of an industry, and even across time.

Six paths framework examples

See how others have used the six paths framework.