From blue ocean to nondisruptive creation

After the publication of our books Blue Ocean Strategy and Blue Ocean Shift, we noticed the same question kept popping up from practitioners, academics and consultants working in the field of innovation.

The question they posed was this: If blue ocean strategy is about the creation of new markets, when looked at through the lens of innovation, isn’t that the same thing as innovating? How does blue ocean strategy differ from the innovation concepts of disruption, disruptive innovation and creative destruction? Given how disruption has become the battle cry of business over the last 20 years, as well as the historical importance of creative destruction, we set out to explore this question on a deeper level.

We began by re-examining our blue ocean data and found that although a few cases – such as Novo Nordisk’s insulin pen and Apple’s iTunes – largely disrupted and displaced existing industries, most blue oceans in our data were born not within the boundaries of an existing industry, but across them. Cirque du Soleil, for instance, created a brand new market space at a high price point across the existing boundaries of circus and theatre. Although it pulled market share from both industries, generating a measure of disruption, it did not significantly displace either industry.

Our examination also revealed something else that greatly intrigued us. Among the cases that had been added to our original database over time, a few had triggered no disruption or displacement at all. This piqued our curiosity. Were these cases a few unconnected anomalies, or were they the tip of an iceberg, examples of a new kind of innovation? If the latter, what were the implications for business and society, now and in the future? And was there a process or an approach by which we could conceive and realise this new kind of innovation in a systematic way?

To answer these questions, we collected historical and current cases on what we would call nondisruptive creation across the for-profit, non-profit and public sectors. As we did, we built a growing new database on nondisruptive creation, and the managerial actions involved in this process.