Having a clear strategy is important when you want to achieve your goals. One useful tool for this is the Strategy Canvas. It helps you see where you can improve and be more innovative, so you can stand out from others. With a strategy canvas, you can make a plan that fits your needs and goals. This article will show you how to use the Strategy Canvas to reach your goals.

What’s a Strategy Canvas Anyway?

A strategy canvas shows an organization’s strategic landscape and future opportunities. It helps businesses compare their offerings to competitors, communicate their strategy, and understand where they and their competitors are investing.

This tool is closely related to strategic planning, as it captures an organization’s current positioning and future prospects in the market in a clear and concise way.

By using a strategy canvas, businesses can identify competition factors, offering levels, and gain insight into their own and their competitors’ strategic profiles and cost structures.

A strategy canvas helps businesses gain a competitive edge by uncovering the factors their industry competes on, enabling them to differentiate themselves and provide unique value to customers.

The flexibility of a strategy canvas makes it a versatile tool for strategic planning, as it can be customized to fit different game plans and capture unique industry-specific factors of competition and offering levels.

Building Your Own Strategy Canvas

Step 1: Know Who You’re Playing Against

Before creating a strategy, it’s important to gather information about the competition. This includes their strengths, weaknesses, and current investments. Understanding the competition can provide valuable insight into what the industry is competing on, what buyers receive, and the overall cost structures.

This knowledge can give an organization a strategic advantage by helping them identify areas where they can differentiate themselves and offer a unique value proposition to customers. Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of opponents allows for the development of a strategy that capitalizes on the competition’s weaknesses while leveraging the organization’s strengths.

Knowing who they are playing against, businesses can make informed decisions and adjust their strategic profiles to gain a competitive edge in the market. Understanding the competition is important in building a compelling blue ocean strategy and ensuring the long-term success of an organization’s offerings.

Step 2: Find Out What Makes the Game Tick

The components of a game’s strategy canvas include factors of competition, the offering level buyers receive, and the strategic profiles and cost structures of the player’s organization and competitors.

Analyzing these components helps players gain insight into current investments, product, service, and delivery factors, and what customers receive from competitive offerings.

Identifying unique factors influencing game dynamics can contribute to developing a winning game plan. This allows players to configure their offerings to set them apart from competitors and optimize cost structures for a competitive edge.

Step 3: Keep an Eye On the Other Players

Observing how other players behave and make decisions is an effective way to keep track of them in the game. It can help you understand their strategies and potential future moves. Paying attention to how they interact with others and handle different situations can also give you clues about their intentions and priorities.

You can use the information you gather about other players to adjust your own strategy. For example, if you notice a competitor always focuses on one part of the game, you might decide to focus on other areas to gain an advantage. Understanding the tendencies and weaknesses of other players can help you tailor your strategy to improve your chances of success.

When keeping an eye on other players, it’s important to avoid making assumptions based on limited information, missing subtle cues, and not adapting to changes in their behavior. Staying open-minded and continually reassessing the actions of other players can help you make better decisions.

Step 4: Map Out How to Win

Mapping out how to win in a given situation involves developing a strategy canvas. This captures the current strategic landscape and future prospects for an organization. The canvas graphically depicts how an organization configures its offering to buyers in relation to its competitors. It communicates the factors of competition and the offering level buyers receive across these factors.

It also allows for the evaluation of strategic profiles and cost structures, providing a clear understandingof where the organization and its competitors are investing.

Identifying key factors and variables that contribute to a successful strategy can be achieved through the analysis of product, service, and delivery factors the industry is competing on, and understanding what customers receive from existing competitive offerings. Using the strategy canvas to visually communicate and analyze these crucial elements is an effective method for plotting out a winning game plan. This helps organizations develop a comprehensive understanding of the competitive landscape and identify opportunities for differentiation and innovation.

Different Types of Game Plans

A Basic Strategy Canvas

A basic strategy canvas shows an organization’s current position and potential future. It compares the organization to its competitors in the market. To make one, an organization needs to look at competition factors, what buyers get, and the cost structures of itself and its competitors. It also involves identifying where the organization and its competitors invest, understanding the product and service factors, and evaluating what customers get from existing offerings.

It’s best used in strategy sessions to clearly communicate proposed strategies. This helps executives present strategies in a few slides, making it easier to understand and analyze the competition.

A Cool Blue Ocean Game Plan

The key steps to building a Cool Blue Ocean Game Plan involve graphically capturing the current strategic landscape and the future prospects for an organization. This is done by depicting the way an organization configures its offering to buyers in relation to those of its competitors.

The plan also needs to crisply communicate the factors of competition, the offering level buyers receive across these factors, and the strategic profiles and cost structures of the organization and its competitors.

Additionally, the plan should allow the organization to see and understand where they and their competitors are currently investing, the product, service, and delivery factors the industry is competing on, and what customers receive from existing competitive offerings.

A Cool Blue Ocean Game Plan differs from other types of game plans in that it focuses on creating a new market space and making the competition irrelevant. It is not about beating the competition, but about making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and the company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space.

The best time to deploy a Cool Blue Ocean Game Plan is when an organization is looking to create a new market space and set themselves apart from the competition in a meaningful way. It offers a strategic framework for organizations to innovate and unlock new avenues for growth and success.

When to Use Your Strategy Canvas

The strategy canvas is a useful tool for understanding an organization’s current strategy and future prospects. It graphically captures important information in a simple picture, allowing businesses to see where they and their competitors are investing. This helps companies understand the factors the industry is competing on and what customers receive from existing offerings.

It’s a good time to use the strategy canvas when there is a need to clearly communicate proposed strategies to executives and the organization is ready to invest resources. It can also help inform decisions on product, service, and delivery factors. However, it’s not effective for decision-making in rapidly changing markets or for in-depth understanding beyond its capabilities.