Colleges and universities spend considerable time and resources developing strategic plans, often using outside consultants. These efforts typically focus on identifying and replicating best practices of other institutions, rather than finding distinctive opportunities. This results in increasing conformity across similar colleges and universities and results in a commoditization of education. This article describes how colleges and universities can use blue ocean shift processes to develop value innovation, breaking the tradeoff between differentiation and cost minimization, and opportunities to use sensemaking to identify a distinctive and sustainable niche in their educational offerings. This involves a focus on creating programs that are attractive to students who would not otherwise be interested in the institution. We then provide a case study of how one institution used the blue ocean shift process to differentiate its educational programs and offerings. We provide evidence demonstrating the impact of the blue ocean shift and comparative enrollment increases for the institution.

学院和大学花费大量时间和资源制定战略计划，通常聘请外部顾问。这些努力通常侧重于识别和复制其他机构的最佳实践，而不是寻找独特的机会。这导致类似学院和大学之间的一致性不断增强，并导致教育商品化。本文介绍了学院和大学如何利用蓝海转变过程来发展价值创新，打破差异化和成本最小化之间的权衡，以及利用意义建构来确定其教育产品中独特且可持续的利基市场的机会。这涉及到重点创建对那些原本对该机构不感兴趣的学生有吸引力的项目。然后，我们提供了一个案例研究，说明一个机构如何利用蓝海转变过程来区分其教育项目和产品。我们提供证据证明蓝海转变和相对入学率增加对该机构的影响。