What is Blue Ocean Strategy?
Blue ocean strategy is the result of a decade-long study by authors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne of 150 strategic moves spanning more than 30 industries over 100 years (1880-2000).
The objective of blue ocean strategy is not to out-perform the competition in your existing industry, but to make it irrelevant through the simultaneous pursuit of higher value and lower cost.
A proven and practical approach to creating profitable growth strategies, blue ocean strategy is based on a family of frameworks, tools, and methodologies, including:
- strategy canvas,
- value curve,
- four actions framework,
- six paths,
- buyer experience cycle,
- buyer utility map, and
- blue ocean idea index.
While innovation has been seen as a random/experimental process where entrepreneurs and spin-offs are the primary drivers, blue ocean strategy offers a systematic and reproducible process in pursuit of value innovation by both new and existing firms.
Making the Competition Irrelevant
While it is one thing to speak about creating new markets, it is all together different to have the tested and proven methodologies and frameworks to systematically create them. Until recently, the field of strategy has been dominated by competitive strategy analytics: they are clear, precise, and important approaches that would only be dropped at a company’s peril.
Yet, these analytics keep us trapped in the red ocean of bloody competition. Without the proper tools and methodologies to successfully create and capture uncontested market space, managers cannot be expected to act on the call to break out of existing competition.
Blue ocean strategy seeks to addresses this imbalance by providing a set of tools and frameworks that make the pursuit of new market space as methodical, codified, and executable as competing in the traditional competitive landscape. A core part of this is the study of barriers a business puts in place to stop non-customers having utility for a product or service
A proven and practical approach to creating profitable growth strategies, blue ocean strategy can be applied across the entire value chain from products, to services, to delivery, and across industries from consumer goods to business-to-business to agriculture.
These frameworks and tools are designed to be visual in order to not only effectively build the collective wisdom of the company but also to effectively execute through easy communication.
The Smart Selling team has been trained by UCSI Blue Ocean Strategy Regional Centre in Australia; the exclusive official representative of Blue Ocean Strategy.
If you’d like more information, contact one of our blue ocean strategy experts
We have posted a case study about Blue Ocean Strategy here on SlideShare. We've also blogged about this case study on the Smart Selling blog