We all know the proverb about teaching someone to fish, but if there are no fish left, knowing how to catch them won’t do you any good. And that’s the position businesses are in today. Resources are being depleted at an alarming rate and the cost of raw materials is rising dramatically. As a result, scholar and entrepreneur Nadya Zhexembayeva says, businesses need to make resource scarcity—the overfished ocean—their primary strategic consideration, not just a concern for their “green” division.
Overfished Ocean Strategy offers five essential principles for innovating in this new reality. Zhexembayeva shows how businesses can find new opportunities in what were once considered useless by-products, discover resource-conserving efficiencies up and down their value chain, transfer their expertise from physical products to services, and develop ways to rapidly try out and refine these new business models. She fills the book with examples of companies that are already successfully navigating the overfished ocean, from established corporations such as BMW, Microsoft, and Puma to newcomers such as Lush, FLOOW2, and Sourcemap.
The linear, throwaway economy of today—in which we extract resources at one end, create products, and throw them away at the other—is rapidly coming to an end. In every industry, creative minds are learning how to make money by taking this line and turning it into a circle. Nadya Zhexembayeva shows how you can join them and avoid being left high and dry.
We are living amidst a remarkable transformation. The linear, throwaway economy of today - in which we extract resources, create products, use them, and throw them away like a cheap plastic fork - is rapidly coming to a close. We are, simply put, running out of things to mine and places to trash.
A new economy is being born, one that takes this line and turns it into a circle. Resource scarcity - the overfished ocean - is the reality virtually every company is swimming in. Those managers who deeply understand and master this shift will be able to turn the new reality into disruptive innovation and remarkable competitive advantage.
Overfished Ocean Strategy offers five essential principles for developing products and services for this new reality. A business owner herself, Nadya Zhexembayeva fills the book with examples of companies that are already successfully navigating the overfished ocean. Unlike less-farsighted companies, they are not making "green" products as a sideline for a niche market but rather have made dealing with resource scarcity the central, driving force of their entire strategy. As these innovators ride ahead of the wave, new products, new business models, new markets, and new profits follow. You can join them, or you can be left standing on the shore.
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