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

Great read for entrepreneurs

If you are starting a business, this book is a must read !!! It has changed my life and helped me to structure our business -and will definitely increase your business’s success long term .

Below are key excerpts that I found particularly insightful:1- "Blue oceans, in contrast, are defined by untapped market space, demand creation, and the opportunity for highly profitable growth. Although some blue oceans are created well beyond existing industry boundaries, most are created from within red oceans by expanding existing industry boundaries, as Cirque du Soleil did. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set."2- "However, there is little practical guidance on how to create them. Without analytic frameworks to create blue oceans and principles to effectively manage risk, creating blue oceans has remained wishful thinking that is seen as too risky for managers to pursue as strategy. This book provides practical frameworks and analytics for the systematic pursuit and capture of blue oceans."3- "Consistent with this observation, our study shows that the strategic move, and not the company or the industry, is the right unit of analysis for explaining the creation of blue oceans and sustained high performance. A strategic move is the set of managerial actions and decisions involved in making a major market-creating business offering."4- "The creators of blue oceans, surprisingly, didn't use the competition as their benchmark. Instead, they followed a different strategic logic that we call value innovation. Value innovation is the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy. We call it value innovation because instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space."5- "To fundamentally shift the strategy canvas of an industry, you must begin by reorienting your strategic focus from competitors to alternatives, and from customers to noncustomers of the industry.^ To pursue both value and cost, you should resist the old logic of benchmarking competitors in the existing field and choosing between differentiation and cost leadership."6- "To reconstruct buyer value elements in crafting a new value curve, we have developed the four actions framework...Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated! Which factors should be reduced well below the industry's standard? Which factors should be raised well above the industry's standard? Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?"7- "The first principle of blue ocean strategy is to reconstruct market boundaries to break from the competition and create blue oceans...Path 1: Look Across Alternative Industries...Path 2: Look Across Strategic Groups Within Industries...Path 3: Look Across the Chain of Buyers...Path 4: Look Across Complementary Product and Service Offerings...Path 5: Look Across Functional or Emotional Appeal to Buyers...Path 6: Look Across Time."8- "To maximize the size of their blue oceans, companies need to take a reverse course. Instead of concentrating on customers, they need to look to noncustomers. And instead of focusing on customer differences, they need to build on powerful commonalities in what buyers value. That allows companies to reach beyond existing demand to unlock a new mass of customers that did not exist before."9- "Companies need to build their blue ocean strategy in the sequence of buyer utility, price, cost, and adoption."10- "Companies, like individuals, often have a tough time translating thought into action whether in red or blue oceans. But compared with red ocean strategy, blue ocean strategy represents a significant departure from the status quo. It hinges on a shift from convergence to divergence in value curves at lower costs. That raises the execution bar. Managers have assured us that the challenge is steep. They face four hurdles. One is cognitive: waking employees up to the need for a strategic shift. Red oceans may not be the paths to future profitable growth, but they feel comfortable to people and may have even served an organization well until now, so why rock the boat? The second hurdle is limited resources. The greater the shift in strategy, the greater it is assumed are the resources needed to execute it. But resources were being cut, and not raised, in many of the organizations we studied. Third is motivation. How do you motivate key players to move fast and tenaciously to carry out a break from the status quo? That will take years, and managers don't have that kind of time. The final hurdle is politics. As one manager put it, "In our organization you get shot down before you stand up.""11- "Key to winning over your detractors or devils is knowing all their likely angles of attack and building up counterarguments backed by irrefutable facts and reason."12- "To change the mass it focuses on transforming the extremes: the people, acts, and activities that exercise a disproportionate influence on performance. By transforming the extremes, tipping point leaders are able to change the core fast and at low cost to execute their new strategy."13- "Because blue and red oceans have always coexisted however, practical reality demands that companies succeed in both oceans and master the strategies for both. But because companies already understand how to compete in red oceans, what they need to 1 learn is how to make the competition irrelevant. This book aims too help balance the scales so that formulating and executing blue ocean strategy can become as systematic and actionable as competing in the red oceans of known market space."

I haven't finished it yet, but so far so good. Im halfway through. easy to follow. Great examples

BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY: Authors - W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, distinguished Fellows of INSEAD, "the business school for the world, which brings together people, cultures and ideas from around the world to change lives and to transform organizations" [...] Major article contributors to name a few, ie., the Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, etc. Both founders of the Value Innovation Network (VIN) and Value Innovation Action Tank (VIAT) in Singapore. Summary - How do you create an uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant? The content of this book is based on the authors believe that high growth and profits can be generated to produce new demand in uncontested and untapped market space, or "Blue Ocean" versus "Red Ocean" strategy, which the competitive rules are known and the industries market space boundaries are defined. Blue Ocean's proposed strategy is to differentiate between product/service and lower cost. This book provides career professionals with creative, insightful innovative ideas through consideration of utility placed on value, price and a cost affective strategy approach to gain uncontested market space. The impact of their strategies will enable a company to position themselves within new market space to sustain profit, growth and maneuver successfully through the worldwide sensitivities, competition and uncertainties affected by the factors and variables of a global economy. The authors provide proven cases, models strategies and examples which substantiate their approach. What five things gleaned from this book regarding the importance of Blue Ocean Strategies are: 1. Marketing leaders would be wise to consider the opportunities of redefining and reconstructing buyer value elements and innovation to create new forms of strategy leading to changes and discovery of recombination(s) and find new solutions to subsystem activities, to serve and reinforce an existing strategic position. 2. Companies would do well to capture the mass of target buyers from the outset and expand the size of the market by offering radically superior value benefits at price points accessible to them. 3. The focus of Blue Ocean Strategy does not restrict output at a high price but rather on creating new aggregate demand through a leap in buyer value at an accessible price. This creates a strong incentive, not only to reduce costs to the lowest possible level at the start but also to keep it that way over time to discourage potential free-riding imitators. 4. Firms with monopolistic positions often do not focus on efficiency and cost reduction and hence consume more scarce resources, consumer demand drops and prices artificially increase. The monopolistic practice, by consuming more of the society's resources, incurs dead weight loss for the society at large and achieved at the expense of consumers and society at large. 5. Learning to develop a Blue Ocean Strategy approach of non-rival and non-excludable goods, such as knowledge, ideas and entrepreneur ingenuity cannot be reproduced and have potential to increase growth. Concluding that Blue Ocean Strategy is based on a non-combative approach to a win-win break through in value achieved by innovation to create new forms of strategy leading to changes and discovery of recombination(s) and finding new solutions to subsystem activities, to serve and reinforce existing strategic position. Buyers win and society at large benefits from improved efficiency.

A simple framework capable of direct how to think about new business opportunities. The authors put a straightforward strategy in how to evaluate the market and how to position the desired product in a way it enjoys little concurrency and sail free from competitors for a good time

The first time I heard about blue ocean strategy was from my business partner. I ordered the book straight after we talked. We started a new business last year and we are in the process of thinking about our idea monetization. This book gives revolutionary hindsights about how to go with business beside pre-defined concepts of differentiation with the concurrence.Simple to read and yet make complex ideas very clear and immediately applicable.

Considero uma boa leitura com uma visão diferente das recomendações academicas. Possui um bom valor para a prática. Bons exemplos.

レッドオーシャン（従来の競争の激しい市場）とブルーオーシャン（自らが切り開く新しい市場）を対比して、新市場戦略を解説する。発売後すぐに古典となった本書には参考になる事例が沢山ある。私が唯一の不賛成の事例さえもかつては光芒を放っていた。。。

(1)原書、(2)日本語訳、(3)オーディオ・ブックの3点セットで、ビジネス英語の聞き取り・発音と表現力のブラッシュアップに活用できます。i-podにアップロードし、通勤時間を有効利用することも可能。日本語版にざっと目を通してから、オーディオ・ブックを聞くことにより、集中力も理解力も高まります。内容については、ご自分でどうぞ。