Ingredients: one plain glass window (in this case at the SoHo Design Within Reach Tools for Living store), some white markers and one talented local artist. Voila, you have transformed existing space into something rather spectacular. But, this isn’t just clever merchandising/marketing. It reflects an attitude of design thinking and innovation. Non-customers will be drawn to this art for it’s originality and personality. Anyone can transform their business without spending a lot of money, so just do it.
Penguin Books have stayed on the leading edge of publishing for years with Blue Ocean thinking including leather-bound pulp novels and classics. Now, they are seizing the day with the iPad.
Via paidcontent.org “The iPad represents the first real opportunity to create a paid distribution model that will be attractive to consumers,” CEO John Makinson told FT’s Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference. “The psychology of payment on tablets is different to the psychology on a PC.”
But Penguin’s thinking bigger than just the one device. Makinson said he sees ebooks hitting 10 percent of book sales next year (it’s currently four percent in the U.S. and Penguin’s ebook sales)…
“We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do. The .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we’re now talking about.
“So for the time being at least we’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications, for sale on app stores and HTML, rather than in ebooks. The definition of the book itself is up for grabs.
“We don’t know whether a video introduction will be valuable to a consumer. We will only find answers to these questions by trial and error.”
Can you imagine being a company where the new products were so highly anticipated that people speculated for months about every detail? This is the legend of Apple. But here’s the amazing thing: just over a decade ago, the company was being declared dead. It was only when Steve Jobs returned in 1997 and re-instilled a deep culture of innovation that Apple began to soar.
We aren’t saying that you will become the next Apple. But, they became today’s Apple by clearly understanding where their new market space would come from by creating products that would draw new non-customers from every walk of life. We believe if you put the principles of Blue Ocean Strategy to work, you will transform your business as well.
Meet John Nese, a truly happy, passionate man. He is obsessive about bubbles: those tiny, carbonated kind that fizz when you open a glass bottle of soda. His Los Angeles store, The Soda Pop Stop is home to hundreds of rare and almost extinct brands that deliver unique flavors. John is passionate about helping small soda-makers from around the globe find new market space.
The cola-wars don’t impress him much. John believes “when the American public has a choice, they’re going to buy it.”
Here’s a big story of a small businessman who understands that happiness is the intersection of business, innovation and strategy.
People ask all the time if Blue Ocean Strategy can work with simple problem solving in design and innovation. The answer is yes, if the cornerstone of Blue Ocean Strategy (value innovation) is followed. Simply put, a product or service must increase value and decrease cost simultaneously. Here’s a clever illustration where our intrepid innovator increases value (“more dominos”) and decreases costs (“labor savings of manually stacking the tiles”).
