Knowledge Resource Centre

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne

Managers often define strategies to drive up quality, improve margins or for the business to become a market leader. However, while these are indeed proven initiatives, their effectiveness will always be fundamentally limited by the margins or horizons of the market. By only working towards or within the current market horizons, businesses could be missing vast untapped resources lying just beyond that horizon.

Blue Ocean Strategy describes how traditional strategy, defined on assumptions of outpacing competitors and increasing market share, fundamentally limits business opportunity. Authors Kim and Mauborgne describe this traditional strategic viewpoint as the 'Red Ocean' - the analogy being that cut-throat competition creates blood-red oceans. The alternative to the red ocean and the fruit of Kim and Mauborgne's considerable labour is the 'Blue Ocean', a concept describing new business possibilities and uncontested market space, without boundaries or competition to darken the water.

Based on formidable research conducted over 15 years, the book looks at examples from 30 different industries, offering reasoned debate with case-studies and practical advice. For successful implementation of Blue Ocean Strategy, the authors put forward their four guiding principles:
 

• Break from the competition
• Focus on the big picture
• Reach beyond existing demand
• Get the strategic sequence right

These four principles highlight the shifts in strategic thinking required in what is now a recognised and hugely successful strategic framework in its own right. Blue Ocean Strategy, most importantly, shows how businesses can make the competition irrelevant. It requires organisations to rethink or throw out their assumptions in order to not just look over, but sail beyond the horizon. Blue Ocean Strategy will be welcomed by strategists at all levels and in all industries, not just for its thorough compendium of academic discussion but its forthright strategic practicality.