Applying Blue Ocean Strategy to Product Development. How a focus on market differentiation and cost opened doorways when developing for clients.

Recently, we worked with a Canadian company, Calego™, which focuses on matching character licenses with a variety of products, some of which fight in a red ocean. They were seeking new innovations for licensed characters. We could have slapped these images on current products with hopes they would sell by the license alone, but it would have been a waste of the value. Instead, we decided to search for a blue ocean strategy. What's something new? What's something no one has done in the market?

We found that consumers with young children were having difficulty keeping the children focused at the dinner table. With toys and technology vying for dinnertime attention, children are often not sitting still, much to the annoyance of their parents. So we used this opportunity to create a line we call interactive mealtime products. We set a goal to turn otherwise normal mealtime products, such as plates, cups and bowls, into real attention-grabbers for children.

We created the Dinner Spinner™, a plate that spins at a touch of a button; the Talking Tumbler™, an interactive cup that talks when a child picks it up; and the Slide Show Tumbler™, which sends a lighted film strip rotating around the cup when activated.

Taking this blue ocean strategy approach for our client, Calego, has led to an almost endless supply of products for us to experiment with in design -- and without the fear of a lot of competition standing in our way.

Applying a blue ocean strategy to product development gave these products room to grow comfortably and placed our client's projects in plain view of their customers.