A Fast Company article on Cirque du Soleil and innovation:

It's this willingness to take creative risk that is Cirque's original genius and the key to its competitive success, says Renee Mauborgne, coauthor of Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (Harvard Business School Press, 2005) and professor of strategy and management at INSEAD. Cirque combined the thrill of the circus with the high production values and intellectual sophistication of the theater or ballet to create a new art form and, along with it, a new "blue ocean" market. The company's future, she says, will depend on its ability to sustain that culture of risk taking, particularly as competitors enter the market. "The danger is that when you begin to be imitated, you start entering into red-ocean competition, where your focus is on outcompeting rivals rather than on creating the next blue ocean," says Mauborgne. "Then the competition, and not the marketplace, sets your agenda

...via elearningpost