A Toro book club pic for 2017.  If you haven’t yet read it, we highly recommend you pickup up a copy of Blue Ocean Strategy, by Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim.

First published in 2005, and expanded and reissued in 2015, this book is a favourite of Toro’s and a number of our clients that we work with to infuse innovation and create new market space in their organizations.

What is a Blue Ocean strategy?  In their book, Mauborgne and Kim observed that “companies tend to engage in head-to-head competition in search of sustained profitable growth. Yet in today’s overcrowded industries competing head-on results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Lasting success increasingly comes, not from battling competitors, but from creating blue oceans of untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.”

Similar to Toro’s strategic approach, a Blue Ocean
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What’s Toro talking about?  Karen and I are always batting around the latest buzz word ‘innovation’ – and how companies could use a good old dose of fresh, innovative thinking…

But, for most, what does this latest buzz really mean?

According to Wikipedia,  innovation is a change in the thought process for doing something or it may refer to an incremental emergent or radical and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations.

According to William Shatner, (aka Captain Kirk, USS Enterprise), innovation is how Star Trek changed the world. Star Trek gave scientist a view of what could be possible which shaped the development of some of today’s technologies.

According to Toro, strategy innovation is  starting with ‘‘tomorrow’’ and planning backwards to ‘‘today.’’

Strategy innovation is future-oriented and must transcend today’s conditions to imagine what is possible.  In this way, the more tangible appeal of new growth opportunities acts
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