Renée Mauborgne

Renée Mauborgne is a professor of strategy at INSEAD, the business school outside Paris, and a fellow of the World Economic Forum. She grew up in the United States and has spent most of her career in France. Since the 1990s she has worked with W. Chan Kim on one question: how do companies grow when every market seems crowded?

Their research reviewed more than a hundred years of strategic moves across thirty industries. The pattern they found was that the biggest and most profitable growth came not from beating rivals but from making competition irrelevant: creating new demand in uncontested space, the blue oceans, rather than fighting over the red ones.

Blue Ocean Strategy (2005) sold more than four million copies in more than forty languages. Blue Ocean Shift (2017) added a step-by-step process, and Beyond Disruption (2023) argued for growth that creates without destroying. Mauborgne co-directs the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute, served on President Obama's board of advisors for historically Black colleges and universities, and has topped the Thinkers50 ranking of management thinkers with Kim.