W. Chan Kim

W. Chan Kim is a Professor of Strategy and the Co-Director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute in Fontainebleau, France.

In 2023 Kim along his colleague Renée Mauborgne was honoured as two of the four leading thinkers in the 100 years of Harvard Business Review’s publication for the global impact of their far-reaching body of research and ideas. In 2019, he and his colleague Renée Mauborgne were named the most influential management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50.

Kim is the co-author of the global bestseller Blue Ocean Strategy, recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written. Blue Ocean Strategy, with over four million copies sold, is being published in a record-breaking forty-nine languages and is a bestseller across five continents. He is also the co-author of the New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Blue Ocean Shift and the USA Today bestseller Beyond Disruption (2023). To date, blue ocean teaching materials have been adopted by over three thousand universities across the globe. His and Mauborgne’s research has inspired the largest virtual high school entrepreneurship competition in the world – The Blue Ocean Student Entrepreneur Competition – with students from over 170 countries and 10,000 high schools participating.

Kim has published numerous articles in top academic and managerial journals including Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of International Business Studies, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Financial Times, among others. The Journal of International Management recognizes Kim as one of the world’s most influential academic journal authors in global strategy.

Kim is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum, Davos and the co-founder of Blue Ocean Global Network and is the recipient of numerous academic and management awards including the Nobels Colloquia Prize for Leadership on Business and Economic Thinking, the Carl S. Sloane Award by the Association of Management Consulting Firms, the Leadership Hall of Fame by Fast Company, the Eldridge Haynes Prize for the best original paper by the Academy of International Business, among others.