Biography
Renée Mauborgne is The INSEAD Distinguished Fellow and a professor of strategy at INSEAD, the world’s second largest business school. She is also Co-Director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute.
Mauborgne is a member of President Barack Obama’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). She is also a Fellow of the World Economic Forum. Her Harvard Business Review articles, co-authored with W. Chan Kim, are worldwide bestsellers. 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 and the Financial Times, amongst others.
Mauborgne 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.
She 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 is an “international bestseller,” after reaching the “Wall Street Journal Bestseller,” “BusinessWeek Bestseller,” and “National (American) Bestseller” status. It has sold over two million copies, is being published in a record-breaking 42 languages, and is a bestseller across five continents. 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.
After being selected as among the top five most influential business thinkers in the world in 2009, Professor Mauborgne was ranked No. 2 on The Thinkers50 2011 list of the world’s top management gurus. She is the highest placed woman ever on Thinkers 50. She also won the 2011 Thinkers50 Strategy Award for her research on blue ocean strategy. Blue Ocean Strategy was recognized as the business book of the last decade. Professor Mauborgne was selected for the 2011 Leadership Hall of Fame by FastCompany magazine and as one of the World’s 50 Best Business School Professors in 2012 by Fortune.com.
Mauborgne received the Nobels Colloquia Prize for Leadership on Business and Economic Thinking 2008 and is the 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. She is the winner of the Prix DCF 2009 (Prix des Dirigeants Commerciaux de France 2009) in the category of “Stratégie d’entreprise.”
L’Expansion named Mauborgne along with her colleague W. Chan Kim 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.” She won the 2007 Asia Brand Leadership Award. Mauborgne is the winner of several European Case Clearing House awards including ‘Best Case in Strategy’ in 2008 and ‘Best Overall Case’ in 2009 across all disciplines.
Mauborgne 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.
Books
Blue Ocean Strategy
How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim
An international bestseller available in 41 languages, breaking Harvard Business School Press's historical record for most foreign licenses.
Winning by Not Competing: A Fresh Approach to Strategy
Since the dawn of the industrial age, companies have engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation. Yet these hallmarks of competitive strategy are not the way to create profitable growth in the future.
In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne argue that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking pool of profit. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and thirty industries, the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors, but from creating "blue oceans": untapped new market spaces ripe for growth. Blue Ocean Strategies describes strategic moves — which the authors call "value innovation" — that create powerful leaps in value that often render rivals obsolete for more than a decade.
Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any company can use to create and capture their own blue oceans. A landmark work that upends traditional thinking about strategy, this book charts a bold new path to winning the future.
Harvard Business Review Press; 1 edition (February 3, 2005)
Praise
"After reading Blue Ocean Strategy, you will never again see your competition in quite the same light. Kim and Mauborgne present a compelling case for pursuing strategy with a creative, not combative, approach. Their emphases on value innovation and stakeholder engagement alone make this book a must-read for both executives and students of business."
— Carlos Ghosn, President and CEO, Nissan Motor Co., Ltd.
"This is an extremely valuable book to read. It examines the experience of companies in areas as diverse as watches, wine, cement, computers, automobiles, and even the circus to shed new light on the development of future strategies."
— Nicolas G. Hayek, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Swatch Group
"I recommend Blue Ocean Strategy to any executive in the private or public sector. It shows how to break from the status quo, create a winning future strategy, and execute this fast at low cost. As much a practical guide as an eye-opener."
— William J. Bratton, Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, former Police Commissioner of the City of New York
"Kim and Mauborgne’s strategies are not only original but practical. Our company has used them and obtained powerful results. The authors chart a bold new path to winning the future."
— Patrick Snowball, Chief Executive, Norwich Union Insurance
Subjects
Renée tailors each presentation to the needs of her audience and is not limited to the topics we have listed below. These are subjects that have proven valuable to customers in the past and are meant only to suggest her range and interests. Please ask us about any subject that interests you; we are sure that we can accommodate you.
How to build businesses with fans, not just customers
How is it that some companies are able to innovate and create products and services that really break the mold? Much time and energy is spent on managing known businesses and me-too products, yet Renée Mauborgne and her colleague Chan Kim’s research shows that the small 14% of firms that Value Innovate capture 36%
of revenues and 63% of profits in their markets. ‘Value Innovation’ is their term for the strategic moves they’ve identified that capture ‘blue ocean market space’—new, untapped market space free of competition.
So what do great innovative brands like Southwest Airlines and Swatch have in common? What do they do differently and what can we learn from them?
In this presentation, Renée Mauborgne identifies 6 paths to Value Innovation and creating new market space:
- Assess your product not only compared to your competitors but also compared to alternatives
for your customer. Southwest airlines decided its competition was the car and not other airlines and developed its offer accordingly.
- Don’t just look at competition in your market segment but look at what other segments are offering. Formule 1 hotels offered 2 star cleanliness, quiet and comfort at 1 star prices, cutting out the other unnecessary frills.
- Every product has users, purchasers and influencers. Why not target a different category from your competitors ? Canon won copier market share from Xerox by focusing on the end user rather than corporate purchasing departments.
- Define your product and services differently from competition. Branson added ground transport to his air transport offer while Dyson went beyond vacuuming to remove the hassle of finding the right bag.
- Flip your industry from functional to emotional—or vice versa. Swatch took the watch industry from functional to fashion, while the Body shop took away the glitter, going back to simple basics.
- Integrate the time factor: how will current trends affect the industry and what does your business need to do differently in the future? Everyone in the room agreed that eliminating ironing had to be a big idea with the current irreversible trend to working families!
Once you have come up with new business ideas, how can you judge which may be the winner? First, you have to be able to sell it in three minutes! Second, the customer must have a compelling reason to buy it, and be able to afford the price you set. Third, can you execute it and make money from it?
Renée then explains why fair process is important in ensuring that everyone in the organization supports innovative new ideas, since resistance to change comes mostly from within. She outlines a process for ensuring acceptance and rapid execution of new initiatives by instituting fair process in cross-functional teams.
Reviews
A professional leadership member organization:
On behalf of [our leadership organization], I am writing to thank you for your excellent presentation at the closing general session of our Annual Meeting. Your session was a perfect way to end the Meeting. I appreciated how your geared your content to the association audience and I especially loved your closing remarks.
Thank you for all that you did to help us create an exceptional learning experience for our attendees.
A major electronics company:
Renée did a wonderful job and our gang really enjoyed her presentation. The meeting in Vienna was great fun and Renée’s presentation played an important part in helping to set the overall tone. And she was really lovely to work with 1:1.
A major international telecommunications company:
On behalf of the whole [...] Program team, I would like to thank you very much for your excellent presentation last week. Your presentation was well received and so inspirational and eye opening for our participants — and stopped us to reflect a little bit even if we are behaving like a flock of wild horses : )
Personally, I liked your inspiring and open presentation style and excellent material and enjoyed the "ahaa"-feeling when the technical participants got some feedback on their communication not reaching the main customers.
From some participants:
- Fabulous speaker! Topic relevant and inspiring. Makes you want to stretch for Blue Ocean strategies!
- Good energy, very good presentation and material.
- Excellent presenter, insightful. Great combination of theory and practice, put ‘strategy’/change into ‘pattern’ => very helpful.
- Very knowledgeable and dynamic speaker. Truly new thinking about strategies.
A major annual conference for CFOs:
What can I say? Renée was riveting. The audience absolutely loved her. The ideas were though-provoking, the content a perfect match for our group. Many people said she was the best speaker we had ever sponsored.
A major technology company:
FABULOUS, really, really terrific, a great speaker. Have gotten some wonderful comments back on her, so a win all around.
Articles
— Harvard Business Review
**Winning by *Not* Competing: A Fresh Approach to Strategy**
Since the dawn of the industrial age, companies have engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation. Yet these hallmarks of competitive strategy are not the way to create profitable growth in the future.
In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne argue that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking pool of profit. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and thirty industries, the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors, but from creating "blue oceans": untapped new market spaces ripe for growth. *Blue Ocean Strategies* describes strategic moves — which the authors call "value innovation" — that create powerful leaps in value that often render rivals obsolete for more than a decade.
*Blue Ocean Strategy* presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any company can use to create and capture their own blue oceans. A landmark work that upends traditional thinking about strategy, this book charts a bold new path to winning the future.