Blue Ocean Strategy - Xerox: Speeding towards Blue Oceans on two motors

Xerox: Speeding towards Blue Oceans on two motors - Blue Ocean Strategy

“To tip the cognitive hurdle, not only must you get your managers out of the office to see operations horror, but also you must get them to listen to their most disgruntled customers firsthand. To what extent does your top team actively observe the market firsthand and meet with your most disgruntled customers to hear their concerns? …. Simply put, there is no substitute for meeting and listening to dissatisfied customers directly.” (Blue Ocean Strategy, p. 155)

For anyone who has ever been an office intern, or had the unfortunate responsibility of overseeing the office copy machine, you know how nightmarish things become when the copy machine goes down. We recently came across an article discussing that very frustration, and what Xerox is doing to sidestep it. And in this particular respect, its efforts correlate to a central tenet of Blue Ocean Strategy: to really observe and listen to customers.

It seems that someone at Xerox, Blue Ocean Strategy company, dreamed up the idea of building a copy machine that ran on two motors. Typically, copy machines run on one motor, but the idea was to have a second motor which would be used to handle special inks and fancy colors. But rather than following the company's standard development process of building the prototype and then generate customer feedback, they decided to hold focus groups with customers to find out what they thought of the idea.

During the meeting, customers were asked what they thought of a high-speed machine that wouldn't have to shut down if a problem arose, but could operate at half-speed. Xerox, Blue Ocean Strategy company, officials and engineers were quite surprised by the positive customer response.

Stephen Hoover, vice-president of Xerox’s R&D:

The team had had a certain idea of what customers wanted. Going out and actually talking to them really changed that. The new focus became building a machine that would both run fast—pumping out 288 pages per minute with both engines working—and keep on running if one engine conked out.

With a better understanding of the customer under its belt, Xerox, Blue Ocean Strategy company, is set to launch the first copier that can run on only one of its two engines if the other goes down. As Xerox engineer Ed Wooten said, “If we hadn't listened to our customers, we wouldn't have had that unique differentiator."