A provider with more than 30 years of service, Jarlette owns 17 retirement and long term care residents in Central, Southern and Northwestern Ontario.

The company brought together its home managers and corporate staff recently in a consultant-led discussion about the “Blue Ocean” strategy, a theory and organizational strategy propounded by authors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgn.

In their book, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (Harvard Business School Press; February 3, 2005), Kim and Mauborgne argue that organizations and companies typically resign themselves to staying in a bloody, competitive “red ocean,” trying to carve out a tiny niche in a shrinking yet over-crowded marketplace.

The Blue Ocean approach, conversely, entails taking an entirely different approach the marketplace or corporate competition.

It contends that the truly innovative organizations establish themselves beyond the competition through “smart strategic moves,” employing an inimitable business approach coupled with unprecedented or widely appealing services or products.

For Jarlette, the process of looking at the strategy was illuminating, says Sandra Fysh, Care Services Coordinator.

“It teaches you to think a different way about your strategic direction,” says Fysh.

“In long term care we often don’t think about our marketing strategies or specifically about customer service,” says Fysh.

The Blue Ocean approach, as stressed by the book’s authors, is inherently not specific to industry, and rather rests on what they dub the “strategic move.”

“Our analysis of industry history revealed that the strategic move, and not the company or the industry, is the right unit of analysis for explaining the creation of blue oceans and the root of profitable growth. By strategic move we mean, the set of managerial actions and decisions involved in making a major market-creating business offering,” say Kim and Mauborgne.

Fysh explains that Jarlette will decide over the next four to six months on how they plan to strategically “move” to create their own blue ocean.

Fysh sees the innovative aspects of the Blue Ocean approach as useful in many scenarios.

“The neat thing about this concept is that it is not just applicable to business.”