Overfished Ocean Strategy: Powering Up Innovation for a Resource-Deprived World

We all know the proverb about teaching someone to fish, but if there are no fish left, knowing how to catch them won’t do you any good. And that’s the position businesses are in today. Resources are being depleted at an alarming rate and the cost of raw materials is rising dramatically. As a result, scholar and entrepreneur Nadya Zhexembayeva says, businesses need to make resource scarcity—the overfished ocean—their primary strategic consideration, not just a concern for their “green” division.

Overfished Ocean Strategy offers five essential principles for innovating in this new reality. Zhexembayeva shows how businesses can find new opportunities in what were once considered useless by-products, discover resource-conserving efficiencies up and down their value chain, transfer their expertise from physical products to services, and develop ways to rapidly try out and refine these new business models. She fills the book with examples of companies that are already successfully navigating the overfished ocean, from established corporations such as BMW, Microsoft, and Puma to newcomers such as Lush, FLOOW2, and Sourcemap.

The linear, throwaway economy of today—in which we extract resources at one end, create products, and throw them away at the other—is rapidly coming to an end. In every industry, creative minds are learning how to make money by taking this line and turning it into a circle. Nadya Zhexembayeva shows how you can join them and avoid being left high and dry.

Nadya Zhexembayeva is the Coca-Cola Chaired Professor of Sustainable Development at IEDC-Bled School of Management in Slovenia and a business owner active in real estate, investment, and consulting. Her recent clients include the Coca-Cola Company, ENRC PLC, Erste Bank, Henkel, Knauf Insulation, and Vienna Insurance Group. She also serves as vice president of Challenge:Future, a global youth think-DO-tank. She earned her doctorate in organizational behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University.