Move beyond competing in crowded markets by learning to create new demand through value innovation and Blue Ocean Strategy. Build the strategic confidence to identify uncontested market space, redesign value propositions and contribute more credibly to growth decisions.
Meet the course lead and explore the practical focus, learning experience, and professional value of this course.
Enroll in this course →Plenty of managers can tell the story of a famous blue ocean. Far fewer can produce a move of their own that survives being questioned
In a crowded market, even good execution is punished. Rivals match one another’s features, everyone discounts to hold share, offerings drift toward commodities, and margin quietly disappears. Competing harder produces motion without growth. The prize is a different one: growth that does not depend on taking share from anyone, created by reconstructing the boundaries of the market rather than accepting them.
The gap is in the doing. Blue Ocean Strategy is among the most admired ideas in management and among the most weakly applied. In practice it becomes a retelling of Cirque du Soleil rather than a method the reader can run on their own industry: a canvas that lifts every factor a little and diverges from no one, a bold new feature with no buyer evidence behind it, a story of someone else’s blue ocean with no move of one’s own. Work in that form cannot be defended in a board paper, and it cannot support a decision about where to compete.
This course closes that gap by making you produce the artifact. Each lesson explains one tool and shows it worked through on a real case — Cirque du Soleil, [yellow tail], Southwest, NetJets and Curves as sourced illustrations — then hands the work to you on your own industry, with a model answer and a rubric to check yourself against, while a single fictional running case is carried the whole way through. By the close you hold a to-be strategy canvas that diverges in shape from every rival, an evidence trail behind each new factor, and a move tested for buyer utility, price, cost and adoption.
Most strategy courses teach you to analyse the market you already occupy and compete more effectively within its accepted boundaries. This course takes the more ambitious step of showing how value innovation can redraw those boundaries, create new demand and make conventional rivalry less relevant. You will develop and defend a practical market-creation move rather than merely diagnose the existing competitive landscape.
You pick a real industry in the opening lessons — where you work, a market you buy from or sell to, or a listed sector you can pull the numbers on — and every lesson applies to it. The output is not a certificate of attendance but a finished blue-ocean move for something you actually need to grow.
Blue Ocean Strategy is usually taught as a set of inspiring stories. Here every lesson works a specific tool — the strategy canvas, the ERRC grid, the six paths, the buyer utility map, the three tiers of noncustomers, the strategic sequence — on a running case and then on your own industry, and the quality rubric your work is measured against is published in the first lessons, so the standard is visible from the start.
Value innovation is a strategy move, not a technology bet, and a blue ocean is not permanent — a successful move is imitated and the ocean it opened eventually turns red. The course teaches those documented cautions directly, along with the innovation-without-value trap, so the method and the judgment to use it well are taught together. Knowing where a tool stops is part of using it competently.
Every MMI course includes a course-specific interactive Practice Toolkit—original Monarch intellectual property developed by Monarch faculty to support its learning objectives. Use the toolkit to apply key concepts, practise professional judgement and produce work you can carry into practice.
Discover Monarch Practice Toolkits →You can distinguish red-ocean from blue-ocean strategy, and name the two strategic logics that separate them You can explain value innovation and why it breaks the value–cost trade-off — as a strategy move, not a technology move You can construct an as-is strategy canvas and read convergence as the signature of a red ocean
You will learn to distinguish red-ocean from blue-ocean strategy, and name the two strategic logics that separate them. You will learn to explain value innovation and why it breaks the value–cost trade-off — as a strategy move, not a technology move. You will learn to construct an as-is strategy canvas and read convergence as the signature of a red ocean. You will learn to apply Eliminate, Reduce, Raise and Create to reconstruct buyer value, filling all four boxes rather than the comfortable two. You will learn to read a value curve for focus, divergence and tagline, and use the three tests as an acceptance test on your own move. You will learn to assemble a decision-ready as-is diagnosis — canvas, reading, verdict and a first ERRC grid.
You can reconstruct market boundaries across the six paths, and say which path a given move is traveling You can locate utility blocks across the buyer experience cycle and the six utility levers You can reach beyond existing demand and de-segment on the blocks the three tiers of noncustomers share
You will learn to reconstruct market boundaries across the six paths, and say which path a given move is traveling. You will learn to locate utility blocks across the buyer experience cycle and the six utility levers. You will learn to reach beyond existing demand and de-segment on the blocks the three tiers of noncustomers share. You will learn to turn path, utility and noncustomer insight into a to-be value curve with a traceable ERRC grid behind it. You will learn to test a move through utility, price, cost and adoption in that order, and place it on the pioneer–migrator–settler map. You will learn to produce and defend a value-innovation decision, and plan for the renewal that keeps it from becoming another red ocean.
Dean of the School
Dr. Jeffrey Henderson is Dean of Monarch Business School and Professor of Business Ethics, with senior management and advisory experience across commercial real estate, finance, and professional services. His career includes leadership roles with Bentall Capital, Brookfield Properties, KPMG Canada, and other international organizations, involving projects exceeding $6 billion. He brings MMI participants an applied perspective on strategic judgement, ethical leadership, organizational responsibility, and the translation of management ideas into credible professional action.
Meet the accomplished professionals who successfully completed their doctoral studies in 2025, bringing deep leadership experience and rigorous scholarship to Monarch Switzerland.
Meet the accomplished professionals who successfully completed their doctoral studies in 2025, bringing deep leadership experience and rigorous scholarship to Monarch Switzerland.
