Competitive Strategy. Blue Ocean Strategy for a German Coffee Start-Up Company

Abstract or Introduction

The objective of this thesis is the conceptual development of the blue ocean strategy for the start-up company "Bonaverde" from Berlin. The Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS) is a holistic approach for the systematic development of profitable business models to capture new markets. The concept of the BOS was developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, university professors at INSEAD Business School. It is the result of fifteen years of investigation, analysing successful companies and their abortive competitors.

Coffee is a brewed, caffeinated beverage prepared from roasted and ground coffee beans, which are the seeds of the berries from the Coffea plant. From the region of origin, Kaffa in Ethiopia, over Arabia which has traditionally enjoyed a monopoly position in former days, the coffee finally reached Europe. Only affordable for well-off citizens and aristocrats at one time, coffee has become the most popular beverage in the world by now.

Today, coffee is grown in more than 70 countries, mainly in regions near the equator such as South America, Southeast Asia, India and Africa. There, the beans are picked, dried and cleaned. The green coffee beans belong to the most valuable and most traded agricultural commodities in the world. About 8.9 million tonnes of raw coffee are annually exported from developing to developed countries.