[Edaily Starin YUN GI BACK Reporter] The emergence of a world-class group of stars can propel an entertainment company to rapid growth overnight. The challenge lies in what comes next. A company’s long-term sustainability hinges on how it can expand the success concentrated on a specific artist to encompass multiple artists, business ventures, and markets.

This is why HYBE’s trajectory—which propelled the group BTS to global stardom—has once again become a subject of study in the international business community. The focus of research, which six years ago centered on BTS’s path to success, has now shifted to HYBE’s corporate strategy for creating new growth engines based on that success.
The Blue Ocean Strategy Institute at INSEAD, a French business school, recently published a case study analyzing HYBE’s growth strategy. The study was authored by Senior Research Fellow Guo Young under the guidance of Professors Kim Wi-chan and René Mauborgne, the creators of the Blue Ocean Strategy.
The research team did not focus on a single “hit IP.” Instead, they examined the series of steps taken by HYBE—starting with the launch of BTS, building the fan platform Weverse, and expanding its business scope through a multi-label approach and global expansion. The study examined, from a management strategy perspective, how HYBE has evolved from a company reliant on a single artist into one that continuously creates diverse intellectual property (IP).

◇After the “Huge Success” of BTS… HYBE’s Expansion Strategy
The INSEAD study identified dependence on a single artist as one of the challenges facing HYBE. In this regard, it also highlighted the “K-pop crisis theory” presented by Chairman Bang Si-hyuk at the 2023 Kwanhoon Forum.
The research team analyzed that HYBE responded to this risk by utilizing a multi-label system and a “glocalization” strategy. This approach involves moving away from a structure where the entire company is dependent on the performance of a single artist, instead securing multiple intellectual properties (IPs) and expanding its operations into the global market.
Weverse was also treated as a key pillar of this growth process. The researchers viewed HYBE’s business expansion—from the launch of BTS and the establishment of Weverse to the transition to a global multi-label system—as a process through which the company pioneered new frontiers in the K-pop ecosystem. The analysis suggests that this approach enabled the company to achieve explosive growth while laying the groundwork for diversification across genres, regions, and business areas.
Ultimately, INSEAD’s assessment of HYBE’s competitiveness does not rest solely on the single success story of BTS. The study focused on the fact that the company has built a structure capable of extending its initial success into new IPs and markets.

◇Six Years Ago: “The Secret to BTS’s Success”… Now, the Focus Is on the Company’s Growth Structure
This perspective becomes even clearer when compared to a 2020 study by Harvard Business School (HBS).
At the time, HBS Professor Anita Elberse studied Big Hit Entertainment, the predecessor to HYBE. Her primary focus was on how a small, non-Western entertainment agency managed to create BTS, a global “blockbuster group.”
The research team focused on the BTS members’ active creative participation, their relationship with the fanbase “ARMY”—centered on music and storytelling—and their communication methods utilizing digital platforms. In essence, the analysis centered on Big Hit’s unique talent development and marketing strategies that gave rise to the super-artists known as BTS.
Six years later, the scope of the research shifted. In addition to the methods that led to BTS’s success, the study now included how the company has created new intellectual property (IP) and expanded its business domains following that success. Interest has thus expanded from the success formula of an individual artist to the company’s growth structure, which encompasses multi-label operations, platforms, and the global market.

This INSEAD research report is used as a textbook for global business students at over 3,000 universities worldwide. This signifies that HYBE’s unique business model—designed under the leadership of Chairman Bang Si-hyuk—is being discussed in the business academia as a case study in corporate strategy for pursuing sustainable growth in the global market.
While international interest previously focused on K-pop’s unique artist development system and fandom culture, the scope of research has now expanded to include how these elements are linked to sustainable corporate growth. HYBE, which began with the success of BTS, has now become a subject of business administration research, with scholars examining how the company plans to replicate and expand upon that success.