Book Renée Mauborgne now

To book Renée Mauborgne for your event, or to discuss your requirements further with one of our consultants, contact us via the web, or call +44 (0) 1628 636 600.

Add Renée Mauborgne to your shortlist



Renée Mauborgne

Professor of strategy at INSEAD. She is also Co-Director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute

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 Fellow of the World Economic Forum. Her Harvard Business Review articles, co-authored with W. Chan Kim, are worldwide bestsellers and have sold over half a million reprints. 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 has become an "International Bestseller," after reaching the "Wall Street Journal Bestseller," "BusinessWeek Bestseller," and "National (American) Bestseller" status. It has sold over two million copies and is being published in 42 languages, breaking HBSP's historical record of most foreign language translations ever achieved. 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.

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. Professor Mauborgne is the winner of the Prix DCF 2009 (Prix des Dirigeants Commerciaux de France 2009) in the category of  « Stratégie d’entreprise ». Thinkers 50, the global ranking of management gurus, places Mauborgne among the top five most influential thinkers in 2009. She was also selected as the highest placed woman on Thinkers 50 ever and was named along with her colleague W. Chan Kim as "the number one gurus of the future" by L'Expansion. 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.

Summary on Blue Ocean Strategy

The primary concept is simple: Blue Oceans represent unknown, uncreated market space. They become wide open opportunities once discovered and executed. Red Oceans, on the other hand, represent known markets. These are highly competitive, segmented, bloody, shark-infested waters with shrinking opportunities. Throughout history, markets are born as blue oceans and evolve to red through competition, commoditization and over supply. The goals of a blue ocean strategy:

  • Create uncontested space
  • Make competition irrelevant
  • Create and capture new demand
  • Break the value-cost trade-off
  • Align your entire system in pursuit of low cost, high margin

Red ocean strategies are self focused, obsessed with their organization’s internal perception of the industry condition, size of opportunities, competition, consumers and timing.

Blue oceans are about creating new opportunities, not creating new varieties of existing products, services or processes. Patterns can be identified and applied to generate innovative thinking. Based on research that included hotels, cinema, retail, airline, industry, computer, home construction, software, cosmetics, steel, auto and energy, common paths were identified for blue ocean strategies.

Innovation comes from seeing across industries, not competing within them. Using Southwest Airlines as one example, Kim cited how they recreated the experience/ expectation of auto travel in the air. Expectations included speed, low cost and high convenience. These are the points that Southwest focused on to differentiate their service and break away from the pack. In the process, a number of services that were industry standard were revealed to be unnecessary or a willing trade-off for a large number of fliers.

What you can learn

  • Why designated ways of building brands, doing publicity and running promotions do not work as they did before
  • How customers changed their buying habits The revolution of the last ten years
  • Goodbye to the social stratification of consumption: The global middle class buys for everyone everywhere
  • Marketing at point of sale: The new architecture of information
  • Why customer service expectations continue to change, and how
  • E-commerce and its impact on consumer behaviour 

Similar Speakers

  • Bill Conaty
  • Nicholas Negroponte
  • Marshall Goldsmith
  • John P. Kotter
  • Lynda Gratton
  • Manfred Kets de Vries
  • Benoit F. Leleux
  • Marco von Münchhausen
  • Jean Dermine
  • Donald Sull

Related Categories


Book Renée Mauborgne now

To book Renée Mauborgne for your event, or to discuss your requirements further with one of our consultants, contact us via the web, or call +44 (0) 1628 636 600.

Add Renée Mauborgne to your shortlist


Return to top

Print page