Blue Ocean Strategy Australia — Make Your Competition Irrelevant

Who's Working On Your Blue Ocean Strategy?

Are your margins under pressure?

Are you fighting competitors for the same customers, mainly on price?

Do you have too many or too few ideas on how to break away from the competition?

With Blue Ocean Strategy, organisations avoid overcrowded markets and excessive competition by identifying and creating uncontested market space of their own. We work with your team to create products, services and market spaces where competition becomes irrelevant.

17+Years in Practice
250+Clients Supported
20+Industries Served
1,000+Individuals Trained
15+Countries Serviced

The Philosophy

Don't Just Compete,
Create a Market

From an early age we're all taught to compete. Competition isn't wrong, it's just a zero sum game; when one wins, another loses. But many businesses have created their own unique market space where competition becomes irrelevant, or at least far less cutthroat.

Blue Ocean Strategy shows you what they did, and how to replicate it in your business, in your industry and geography, with your team. It's not just for large incumbents or start-ups, and even not-for-profits benefit from Blue Ocean Strategy. It's time to add category and demand creation skills to your competitive strengths.

Learn more about the methodology
"The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition."

W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne

Creators of Blue Ocean Strategy

We understand what you're dealing with

Large Organisations

We understand the complexities of aligning and committing a large and professional leadership group to a new strategic direction. We know how the noise of competing priorities, entrenched assumptions, and internal politics can stall even the most important initiatives. We help leadership teams move from strategic overwhelm to a direction they have genuinely built together and are committed to acting on.

See our approach

Growth Businesses

We understand the pressure of choosing the right direction before your resources get locked into the wrong one. We know how easy it is to keep optimising a model that is working for now but may not survive the next wave of competition and that however critical pivoting is, it's never easy. We help growth businesses find the market spaces where their specific assets and capabilities give them the most sustainable advantage.

See our approach

Boards & Investors

We understand what genuine market differentiation looks like, where it creates lasting value, and where it is merely noise. We know that the hardest governance questions are not about whether the strategy is ambitious. They're about whether the organisation is properly positioned to create and capture value that competitors cannot easily replicate.

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Our Services

Workshops and Programmes

Facilitated Blue Ocean Strategy sessions from a half-day executive introduction to multi-month embedded programmes. Customised for teams of any size. We have found that the most powerful results often come from longer-form programmes where the strategy is not simply announced. It emerges.

Explore Workshops

Fractional Strategy Advisory

We provide fractional staff for ongoing or ad hoc access to strategic thinking embedded with your team. An ideal solution for organisations navigating significant change, competitive pressure, or growth inflection points, with a flexible model at a fraction of the cost of a full-time appointment.

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Our Frameworks & IP

Including Competitive Strategy's Dirty Little Secret: The Sidelining of Comparative Advantage

We primarily marry three strategic planning methods: Comparative Commitment, Blue Ocean Strategy and Emergent Strategy.

The first is our own proprietary process that aligns your team on the competitive and comparative advantages of your organisation.

The second is Blue Ocean Strategy. Over nearly 20 years of practice we have refined the original linear application of tools and frameworks, to a more sophisticated acknowledgment of our clients' different starting points, and the cyclical nature of research, testing, piloting, refining and scaling.

The third is Emergent Strategy principles that allow strategies to evolve as customers and competitors react and our clients respond in turn.

Important to our unique approach is our understanding of comparative advantages when it comes to organisational strategy. Over 40 years ago, academics and practitioners made a conscious choice to focus the language of organisational strategy on Competitive Advantage, and sidelined the concept of Comparative Advantage. We have not.

Comparative Commitment is the framework we built to re-surface distinctions that have been lost.

Trusted by organisations across Australia and beyond

Medibank
Bupa
Allianz
Australian Unity
Toll
John Holland Group
Vicinity Centres
Ergon Energy
Laminex
Carers Victoria
Drake
Kinross
Panduit
Aafiya
CFO Accelerator
SMILE
PALTD
Arriva Properties
Fleet Plant Hire Solutions

Selected past engagements

Selected Client Impact

Different strategic challenges call for different forms of engagement. These examples show how BOSA has helped leadership teams move from an important question to focused choices, initiatives and action.

Financial services

National Australia Bank

Product and service innovation

The Challenge

Identify new products or services capable of addressing a projected multimillion-dollar future budget gap.

Our Engagement

BOSA facilitated a hand-picked, cross-bank team of 12 using Blue Ocean Strategy tools to uncover unmet customer needs.

The Impact

The team narrowed 103 insights, ideas and product concepts to four proposals for senior-executive investment review. The divisional CEO described the leading approved idea as a game changer.

Discuss a similar engagement

Essential services and utilities

Ergon Energy

Regulated-market strategy

The Challenge

Respond to established competitors, disruptive providers, fast-moving technology and uncertainty in regulation and strategic direction.

Our Engagement

BOSA coached an eight-person, senior cross-divisional team through a 16-week Blue Ocean Strategy roadmap.

The Impact

More than 30 viable initiatives were compared through BOSA’s Extended Litmus Test, producing a shortlist of four for a broader Strategy Fair with senior staff and partners.

Discuss a similar engagement

Insurance and financial services

Allianz Worldwide Partners

Global innovation program

The Challenge

Build collaboration and innovation across a newly connected global group facing commoditisation and technological disruption.

Our Engagement

A 25-executive pilot combined facilitated learning, live challenges and a digital innovation platform before scaling to a six-week competition.

The Impact

The scaled program involved 400 senior managers. Four ideas received global innovation awards and funding, with further proposals progressing as local improvement projects.

Read the client case study

Mining and resources

Kinross Gold Russia

Operational value innovation

The Challenge

Help specialist teams identify value across the interfaces of a complex, remote Arctic mining operation.

Our Engagement

BOSA delivered a three-month, multilingual hybrid program with two on-site visits, treating adjacent functions as internal customers and suppliers.

The Impact

Cross-disciplinary work surfaced improvements in handovers and communication, opportunities to trial technology, and new applications for expertise held in other divisions.

Read the client case study

Construction and engineering

John Holland

Enterprise strategy alignment

The Challenge

Create a shared strategic framework while enabling divisions to develop and test their own strategic choices.

Our Engagement

BOSA prepared divisional strategy leaders with a common framework, question banks and workbooks ahead of the annual management offsite.

The Impact

A Strategy Trade Show gave leaders a structured way to examine draft strategies across divisions and provide feedback, with the aim of strengthening collaboration, buy-in and alignment.

Discuss a similar engagement

Health and hearing services

Amplifon and Bupa Health Services

Strategic partnership and launch

The Challenge

Conceive and implement a partnership between a national hearing-services provider and a major health-insurance group.

Our Engagement

BOSA worked with both senior leadership teams on the concept, introductions, planning and implementation facilitation.

The Impact

The partnership moved Bupa’s retail hearing services to Amplifon and supported service propositions for Australian Defence Force personnel, aged-care residents, Bupa members and their families.

Discuss a similar engagement

These summaries describe past engagements and the client context recorded at the time. Organisational structures, operations and priorities may have changed.

What Our Clients Say

"

Andrew's Blue Ocean thinking completely reframed how our leadership team approached our five-year strategy. Instead of fighting harder in a shrinking market, we found an entirely new direction that our competitors simply couldn't follow.

— Chief Strategy Officer

ASX-listed Healthcare Organisation

"

The workshop cut through months of circular debate. We left with a strategic direction we had genuinely built together and were committed to executing. That alignment alone was worth the engagement.

— Managing Director

National Professional Services Firm

"

What differentiates Blue Ocean Strategy Australia is that they stay with you through implementation, not just the ideation phase. The Comparative Commitment framework in particular gave us a language for decisions we'd been struggling to articulate for years.

— Board Director

Growth Business

Ready to find your Blue Ocean Strategy?

A short discovery call costs nothing but can change everything.