Webtoon Entertainment, a subsidiary of Korea’s dominant search engine, Naver, with over 60% of the market share, is a prime example of how a company creates and captures new market opportunities in the era of digital transformation.

In 2011 Katrina Lake launched a new type of online retailing, Stitch Fix, a personal styling service based on a mix of human creativity and artificial intelligence, and grew it into a $3.6B company. Like many other successful retail businesses, it rapidly caught Jeff Bezos’s eye. And nothing good comes when Jeff Bezos notices you and decides to compete.

In October 2021, Facebook changed the parent corporation name to Meta and announced plans to build a metaverse, a 3D virtual world for work and fun. This case explores whether Meta’s metaverse is likely to be a blue ocean utopia for people and society at large or some form of dystopia.

This case describes how the Chinese internet healthcare company Ping An Good Doctor created a nondisruptive solution for addressing a key challenge in China’s healthcare industry: Seeking healthcare was difficult for many Chinese people due to the relative scarcity and uneven distribution of high-quality healthcare services.

The case helps participants explore and understand the difference between value innovation, the creation of a leap in value, and technology innovation, the creation of breakthrough technology. It teaches students to identify value innovation offerings, how value innovation differs from technology innovation and their commercial consequences.

The notion that innovation is tied to creative destruction is embedded in the psyche of innovators and entrepreneurs, which is why individuals and companies instinctively focus on disruption in pursuit of innovation and growth. But is disruption the only way to innovate and create new markets? And is it the best way?

Retail had always fascinated Katrina Lake, the youngest woman CEO to ever lead a US initial public offering. But she couldn’t help noticing that the age-old industry never changed. Brick-and-mortar retailers still competed on variety and touch-and-feel, while online competitors sought to differentiate through low prices and fast shipping.

In the year 2000, only 2% of women in India used menstrual hygiene products. Almost a quarter-billion relied on cloth rags and many rural women were banished to a hut during their monthly cycle. In these unsanitary conditions, 62.4% had experienced at least one reproductive tract infection, with the result that teenage hysterectomies were not uncommon.

The case describes how three INSEAD alumni founded a fintech company called Prodigy Finance and created a new market of international student loans by solving a long unaddressed problem in the finance industry.

The background notes accompany the free online case “Indian Premier League: Innovation Without Disruption”, a self-paced, interactive case that lets readers analyze the strategic logic behind the launch of Indian Premier League (IPL) using blue ocean analytical tools and frameworks.