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VALUE INNOVATION OR BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY
Dr. Chan and Mauborgne of INSEAD studied the interesting phenomenon, in line with Dr. Schnaar’s findings, that the gazelle, ie. high growth, profitable firms are not necessarily very innovative in the technological sense. Very often the fastest and most sustanainable growth in (new) companies has been found by entrepreneurs, who are not pioneers in a technological sense. But they know how to add value at critical points in the delivery of a product or service. How can we best identify and serve buyers’ overall needs and offer them unparalleled value? That demands the
mapping of an “innovation value curve”: a chart. You can get the book at Amazon .
The Value Innovation Chart promises to let you find the “Blue Ocean” of your innovation: a place where the big fish are (“where’s the big fish?”) and you see only blue ocean, i.e. no other fishermen. In my course I give examples of Innovation Charts and let participants develop a few themselves. I have found a number of other references, which we use to understand and use the concept.
Drawing a VI Chart is the “acid test” of any invention. You need to focus on your strong and weak points compared with that of the competition. To do so, you need to iterate the process many times, finetuning your parameters and your competition, which in turn requires support from good intelligence sources, which is another topic in my clinic. See later
I quite often find that researchers are not very keen on or even understand that there is a need for an added value proposition. How does your invention (radically) improve existing practice? Very often researchers will tell you that their goal was to find something Novel, not necessarily to test whether it is Good compared to prior art. I teach and practice some interview tricks to find the Blue Ocean.
In a later article, I'll review and give reference to the Danish Gazelle studies, a very interesting body of insight for the tech transfer professional.PS: ;-) recently, some microbiologists, I work with, told me that they don't understand the "Blue Ocean" metaphor. For them the Big Fish are close to the coastline, not in blue oceans!
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