BLUE OCEAN THINKERS

Des Dearlove and Stuart Crainer offer a peek into the ‘blue ocean’ concept and its shaping by 2019 Thinkers50 #1 duo W Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

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DES DEARLOVE AND STUART CRAINER are Founders and Directors of Thinkers50 and internationally recognised experts and commentators on management ideas. Dearlove and Crainer are the authors of more than 15 books available in 20 languages. Former columnists to The Times (London), they are editors of The Financial Times Handbook of Management.

For more than a decade, W Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne have been a fixture in the top five of the Thinkers50 ranking. In 2011, they won the Thinkers50 Strategy Award for ‘the business book of the decade’, Blue Ocean Strategy. In 2013, they were shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Global Solutions Award and in 2015, for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award.

In 2019, they topped the Thinkers50 ranking for the first time, joining an elite list of previous #1 thinkers, including the legendary Peter Drucker, the late and greatly missed Clay Christensen and C K Prahalad, Michael Porter (inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2018), and Roger Martin (ranked #1 in 2017 and #2 in 2019).

Mauborgne is the first woman to occupy the #1 position and Kim is the first from North Asia. It is also the first time that professors from a European business school have been named as the world’s most influential management thinkers.

Professors of strategy at INSEAD, Kim and Mauborgne are also co-directors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute in Fontainebleau, France. They are fellows of the World Economic Forum, Davos, and founders of the Blue Ocean Global Network.