THE STRATEGY CANVAS
Action framework for building Blue Ocean Strategy
Serves two purposes
SHIFTING THE STRATEGY CANVAS
“Offer more for Less” is not the answer
Redefine industry problems
FOUR ACTIONS FRAMEWORK
Four questions to challenge an industry’s strategic logic and business model:
 Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated?
 Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard?
 Which factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard?
 Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?
ELIMINATE
Eliminating factors that companies in your industry have long competed on.
Market Street:
 Eliminate packaged foods and TV dinners
REDUCE
Determine whether products or services have been overdesigned in the race to match
and beat the competition.
Market Street:
 Reduce bad eating habits and junk food intake
RAISE
Pushes you to uncover and eliminate the compromises your industry forces
customers to make.
Market Street:
 Raise health awareness
CREATE
Discover entirely new sources of value for buyers and create new demand and shift
the strategic pricing of the industry.
Market Street:
 Create fresh family-style meals
YELLOW TAIL
Reduced or Eliminated: tannins, oak, complexity, and aging
Raise: price versus budget wines
Create: ease of selection
THE ELIMINATE- REDUCE-RAISE CREATE
GRID
It pushes them to simultaneously pursue
differentiation and low cost to break the value-cost
trade off.
It is easily understood for manager.
It drives companies to robustly scrutinize every factor
the industry competes on, making them discover
the assumptions that they make unconsciously in
competing.
THE ERRC GRID: THE CASE OF CIRQUE DU
SOLEIL
THREE CHARACTERISTICS OF A GOOD STRATEGY
Focus
 Every great strategy has a focus…
Divergence
 When a company’s strategy is formed reactively as it tries to keep
up with the competition, it loses it’s uniqueness.
Compelling Tagline
 A good strategy has a clear-cut & compelling tagline…
READING THE VALUE CURVES
Being able to read the Strategy
canvas enables a company to see
into the future and also into the
present.
BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY
Focus
Divergence
Compelling Tagline
These are key
factors to see the
viability of a Blue
Ocean Idea
INCOHERENT STRATEGY
OTHER THINGS TO LOOK FOR
Strategic Contradictions
&
Internally Driven Company's