W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne

Kim and Mauborgne spent over a decade building the database of strategic moves — from Model T to Cirque du Soleil — that became the 2004 Harvard Business Review article and the 2005 book, one of the best-selling strategy titles ever written. Their partnership itself is the counter-example to lone-genius strategy lore: every tool in the framework was co-developed and empirically derived.

Kim and Mauborgne are strategy's great duet — co-directors of INSEAD's Blue Ocean Strategy Institute and co-authors of every major work in the canon they created. Their decade-long study of 150 strategic moves produced the field's most direct challenge to Porter: industry structure isn't destiny, because value innovation can redraw it. Blue Ocean Strategy became one of the best-selling strategy books ever written and put tools — the strategy canvas, the ERRC grid, tiers of non-customers — into rooms that had previously only had metaphors.