Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space

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In Blue Ocean Strategy, W.

Chan Kim and Ren?

e Mauborgne tackle the central problem facing all businesses: how to perform better than your competitors?

Their solution involves taking a creative approach to the normal view of competition.

In the normal framework, competition is a zero-sum game: if there are two companies competing for the same market, as one does better, the other has to do worse.

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The authors?

creative leap is to suggest one can beat the competition by not competing.

Companies should avoid confronting competitors in crowded marketplaces, what they call ?

red oceans,?

and instead seek out new markets, or ?

blue oceans.

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Once the blue oceans have been identified, companies can get down to the task of creating unique products which exploit that market.

Chan and Mauborgne argue, for example, that a wine company might decide to start appealing to a group previously uninterested in wine.

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This would be a ?

blue ocean?

market, giving the winemaker a huge advantage, which they could exploit by creating a wine that appealed to the tastes of a beer-drinking demographic.

A classic of business writing, Blue Ocean Strategy is creative thinking and problem solving at its best.