The Panera Bread Blue Ocean

The Panera Bread Blue Ocean

A critical question about Blue Ocean Strategy is whether its ideas are prescriptive or merely descriptive. That is, is there a recipe to find, define, and attack an uncontested market space? Or are they only visible after they appear, like a field of dreams? Au Bon Pain’s metamorphosis into Panera Bread shows how one blue ocean was built.

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Panera Bread Body Surfing
Entrepreneurship, Innovation, MDM, AI at Work Mark Palmer Entrepreneurship, Innovation, MDM, AI at Work Mark Palmer

Panera Bread Body Surfing

Panera Bread’s story is pure entrepreneurial inspiration. On NPR’s How I Built This, Ron Shaich, founder and CEO, compared building Panera to body surfing waves in the ocean. I loved that metaphor, and, 10 days, I’m going to share each element of his story, wrapped in the body surfing metaphor and images from some of the world’s best surfing photographers to illuminate each idea.

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