Question

Honey Farm Family business, past down to four generations.

Overview

The situations you faced and the decisions you made in the simulation may have affected the company’s success in obtaining a competitive advantage over the market. As you have learned in this module, opportunity-based thinking is critical to blue ocean strategy (BOS). For a business to achieve success through BOS, its leader must have the right mindset and ask deeper questions to hopefully remove bias and false boundaries from their judgment.

Prompt In this journal, you will reflect on whether and how your decisions in the simulation aligned with blue ocean strategy principles, innovation, and competitive advantage.

Discuss your opportunity-focused mindset during the simulation by answering the questions below:

Value creation and competitive advantage: How do you think the company did regarding value creation and gaining a competitive advantage across generations?

Answer 1

The Honey Farm Family business's success in implementing BOS principles across generations likely resulted in creating unique market value and a competitive advantage by focusing on innovation and minimizing direct competition.

Step-by-step explanation:

Throughout generations, the Honey Farm Family business has likely faced various challenges in maintaining a competitive advantage and creating value. By applying a blue ocean strategy (BOS), the business needed to innovate and shift away from fierce competition, focusing instead on creating new demand and making the competition irrelevant. As the business was passed down through four generations, the focus on innovation and an opportunity-focused mindset would have been essential for aligning with BOS principles, through offerings that were unique to the market, thus driving the company's success and creating new avenues for value.

Understanding the concepts such as absolute advantage as in the case of geography affecting coffee production in the United States, and computing opportunity costs like those of producing sweaters and wine in France and Tunisia, are fundamental to identifying where the business can optimize its processes and outputs to achieve lower opportunity costs and higher value. Engaging in these critical analyses allows the company to position itself strategically in the market.

Lastly, recognizing the value of a monopoly situation as opposed to perfect competition highlights the appeal of uniqueness and reduced competition, which aligns with BOS that aims to create a space where a business can operate with minimal direct competition, thus leveraging their unique value proposition to gain an edge in the market.