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| Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant | 
 enlarge | Authors: W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  166 reviews
Sales Rank: 616
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1
ISBN: 1591396190
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.802
EAN: 9781591396192
ASIN: 1591396190
Publication Date: February 3, 2005
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Product Description
Winning by Not Competing: A Fresh Approach to Strategy Since the dawn of the industrial age, companies have engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation. Yet these hallmarks of competitive strategy are not the way to create profitable growth in the future. In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne argue that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and thirty industries, the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors, but from creating "blue oceans": untapped new market spaces ripe for growth. Such strategic moves-which the authors call "value innovation"- create powerful leaps in value that often render rivals obsolete for more than a decade. Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any company can use to create and capture blue oceans. A landmark work that upends traditional thinking about strategy, this book charts a bold new path to winning the future. W. Chan Kim is the Boston Consulting Group Bruce D. Henderson Chair Professor of Strategy and International Management at INSEAD. Renee Mauborgne is the INSEAD Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Strategy and Management.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 161 more reviews...
 Value Innovation - strategy book of the year 2005? January 10, 2005
396 out of 427 found this review helpful
The authors have published many articles over the last decade on Value Innovation. This is their first book. It summarizes their extensive knowledge on out-of-the-box strategic thinking.
What is a BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY? The authors explain it by comparing it to a red ocean strategy (traditional strategic thinking):
1. DO NOT compete in existing market space. INSTEAD you should create uncontested market space.
2. DO NOT beat the competition. INSTEAD you should make the competition irrelevant.
3. DO NOT exploit existing demand. INSTEAD you should create and capture new demand.
4. DO NOT make the value/cost trade-off. INSTEAD you should break the value/cost trade-off.
5. DO NOT align the whole system of a company's activities with its strategic choice of differentiation or low cost. INSTEAD you should align the whole system of a company's activities in pursuit of both differentiation and low cost.
A red ocean strategy is based on traditional strategic thinking - e.g. Harvard's strategy guru Michael Porter.
Some cases:
* Airline industry price wars result in bankruptcies and low profit margins. Southwest Airlines creates a new market by offering the speed of air travel with the low cost and flexibility of driving.
* Golf equipment industry competes to win a greater share of existing golf customers. Callaway Golf creates "Big Bertha", a golf club with a large head that attracted new customers to golf that had been frustrated by the difficulty of hitting the ball.
* The cosmetic industry creates a red ocean with models, expensive advertising, and promises of youth and beauty. The Body Shop creates a blue ocean that lasts more than a decade by creating functional cosmetics that defied the industry which sold emotionally appealing cosmetics.
* The wine industry gluts the market with a red ocean of thousands of brands competing on the finest oaks and tannins and legacy winey names. Casella wines creates [yellow tail], a blue ocean wine that succeeded by eliminating complexity, elitism and consumer confusion and creating a fun simple image that non-wine drinkers could enjoy.
A blue ocean is created in the region where a company's actions favourably affect both its cost structure and it value proposition to buyers. Cost savings are made from eliminating and reducing the factors an industry competes on. Buyer value is lifted by raising and creating elements the industry has never offered. Over time, costs are reduced further as scale economies kick in, due to the high sales volumes that superior value generates.
Examples of strategic moves that created blue oceans of new, untapped demand:
- NetJets (fractional Jet ownership)
- Cirque du Soleil (the circus reinvented for the entertainment market)
- Starbucks (coffee as low-cost luxury for high-end consumers)
- Ebay (online auctioning)
- Sony (the Walkman - personal portable stereos)
- Cars: Japanese fuel-efficient autos (mid-70s) and Chrysler minivan (1984)
- Computers: Apple personal computer (1978) and Dell's built-to-order computers (mid-1990s).
The INSEAD professors Kim and Mauborgne have written regularly on the subject of Value Innovation since 1997 in Harvard Business Review. Being a business development manager, their thought leadership on strategic innovation has inspired me tremendously over the years. Their articles have been standard texts for many MBA students for some time (e.g. "Value Innovation", "Creating New Market Space", "Charting your Company's Future"). I expect their first book to be just as dominant in any strategy library as Michael Porter's books (the guru behind the classic red ocean strategies).
Peter Leerskov,
M.Sc. in International Business (Marketing & Management) and Graduate Diploma in E-business
 Buy this book for your competition! August 10, 2006
136 out of 161 found this review helpful
As opposed to many of the other reviewers we tried to use this process in a strategic marketing session with four teams in our company. THis was a frustrating and disappointing process! First, the book is a trite misrepresentation of an ex post facto process that has been dismissed by professional researchers and analysts. You do NOT prove your theory by fitting the past into your "model of the future". They did NOT work with Southwest Airlines to make them successful. They looked for examples that fit their thesis and applied it to ones they knew were succssful. This is not academically honest nor is it a good way to predict the future. It is like using Neural Networks to make predictions - they are 100% accurate in predicting the past.
Second, our team got to the point that we "believe" we found an underserved market area and we have three options and a full list of targeted areas for discussion. Now, how in the world can this book or anyone else on my team or in our company give me any insight into which one of these will be accepted by a prospect? This book promotes the worst form of pedantic navel gazing and raises self-reference to an absurd level. If we held the answer we would not need the strategic marketing exercise. Continuing this charade does us all a disservice. I worked with and managed product marketers for years in high tech companies who had companies like IBM and Intel as our customers. They did not do pencil whipping exercises. They went out and talked to prospects and asked them what they needed. This is not a novel approach but this Blue Ocean strategy seems to think that validation comes at the end after lots of silly charting and analysis.
This book will send you on a fools' errand. Buy it for your competition and hope that they follow it.
"To strive, to seek, to find...." January 31, 2005
124 out of 137 found this review helpful
This is an especially thought-provoking book which, as have so many others, evolved from an article published in the Harvard Business Review. According to Kim and Mauborgne, "[in italics] Blue ocean strategy [end italics] challenges companies to break out of the red ocean of bloody competition by creating uncontested market space that makes the competition irrelevant...This book not only challenges companies but also shows them how to achieve this. We first introduce a set of analytical tools and frameworks that show you how to systematically act on this challenge, and, second, we elaborate the principles that define and separate blue ocean strategy from competition-based strategic thought." There are six principles which are introduced and then discussed on pages 49, 82, 102, 117, 143, and 172, respectively.
Frankly, I was somewhat skeptical that this book could deliver on the promises made in its subtitle. In fact, the material provided by Kim and Mauborgne is essentially worthless unless and until decision-makers in a given organization accept the challenge, are guided and informed by the six principles, and effectively use the tools within appropriate frameworks. The responsibility is theirs, not Kim and Mauborgne's. To assist their efforts, Kim and Mauborgne focus on several exemplary companies which have dominated (if not rendered irrelevant) their competition by penetrating previously neglected market space. They include the Body Shop, Callaway Golf, Cirque du Soleil, Dell, NetJets, the SONY Walkman, Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, the Swatch watch, and Yellow Tail wine.
Of greatest interest to me is Kim and Mauborgne's assertion that the innovations which enabled these companies to succeed with a Blue Ocean strategy did NOT depend upon a new technology. Rather, each company pursued a strategy which enabled it to free itself from industry boundaries. For Dell, that meant mass production of computers sold directly to consumers per each customer's specifications. Quite literally, each sale is "customized." For Callaway, creating an enlarged sweet spot to increase the frequency of solid contact for new or infrequent golfers just as, years ago, the enlarged Head racquet did so for new or infrequent tennis players. For Starbucks, creating a congenial environment within which to socialize, go online, or read while consuming coffee. All of these Blue Ocean strategies created new or much greater value for customers. Their emphasis is on the quality of experience, not on the benefits of a new technology.
According to Kim and Mauborgne, their research indicates 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." The cornerstone of a Blue Ocean strategy is value innovation which occurs "only when companies align innovation with utility, price, and cost positions. If they fail to anchor innovation with value in this way, technology innovators and market pioneers often lay the eggs that other companies hatch." For Kim and Mauborgne, value innovation is about strategy that embraces the entire system of a company's activities. It requires companies to orient the whole system toward achieving a "leap" in value for both buyers and themselves. Kim and Mauborgne explain HOW to create uncontested market space wherein competition is essentially irrelevant.
To paraphrase Henry Ford, whether decision-makers think they can or think they can't do that, they're right.
I thought oceans were deep... January 11, 2006
65 out of 72 found this review helpful
This book is mostly "fluff". Its basic argument is that companies who find themselves in hotly contested markets ("red oceans") should look for uncontested markets ("blue oceans"). They should do it in such a way as to ensure revenues (so go for mass), and profit (so watch the cost). Wow. I guess if the authors said: go for high-cost-small-markets, at least it will be original! The problem with this book is that it is a mishmash of old ideas, and its mortal sin is that it is trivial. It looks at successful products and service offerings, and in retrospect identifies the characteristics that made them succeed (at least revenue wise, there is no real financial analysis in this book). Naturally, finding those characteristics is the real issue, and it is the realm of entrepreneurial vision. Beyond some trivial labels placed on common sense planning activities, Blue Ocean does not help one iota in finding uncontested markets with large profit potential. Anyone who seriously tries to apply the ideas in the book will find they are either trivial or fluff.
The lack of originality is everywhere. Let's look closer: The book main point is that companies must do different things than competitors to be in uncontested markets. Fans of Michael Porter will immediately recognize this as the theme of his seminal 1996 article "What is Strategy" (go to www.hbsp.harvard.edu to buy this article). Interestingly enough, Kim and Mauborgne published their first work on value innovation in...yes, 1997. Porter identified three bases for successful strategies: need-based, variety-based, and access-based. Unlike the authors of Blue Ocean, he did not pretend to have an a priori formula for finding success. All he did was to show what makes a superior strategy, and why superior strategies are sustainable over a long period of time. Kim and Mauborge wrote a "formula" type prescription to finding quick success (by avoiding competition), but they neither truly give any tools to do so, nor prove that the companies they feature have created a sustainable profitable advantage. What the authors say is: focus, diverge and have a great marketing tagline. In other words - you want to be different? Be different. And how do you know which different to be? Ahhh, that's simple. Look at what customers and noncustomers need but do not get from the existing offering of the incumbents in the industry. Wow. Who would have thought about that?
The main tool of this book, the strategy canvas, is nothing more than an after the fact simplified two dimension graphical presentation of product or services' characteristics that make some products better than others. Do you remember the Quality Deployment Function, a product/service design matrix that came out of Japan, developed in the 80s by the Japanese consultant Yoji Akao? The QFD framework has been used by Japanese companies for decades now to translate "true" (and often unmet and unstated) customer needs into actions and designs to build and deliver a quality product. QDF also came with a little graphic help, but more sophisticated than the one in this book. Finding which characteristics will be the wining ones is an old market research goal, and it is much easier in retrospect.
The authors are not beyond copying any once popular simple concept. In chapter 4 they introduce with a big fanfare a revolutionary new concept, classifying businesses as Pioneers, Migrators, or Settlers. Anyone recognizing Boston Consulting Group's portfolio matrix of cash cow, question mark and star companies is not wrong. This simplistic labeling is what made BCG so popular (and destroyed many companies and made Wall Street discount conglomerates in the US) and probably why this book has attracted people desperately looking for simple solutions in complicated contested markets. But anyone actually responsible for charting strategy and managing competition in real contestable markets (i.e., business managers and executives) will quickly realize this book has no practical substance. It is all fluff. And if you are lucky to create a less contested market, this book will tell you nothing about how to KEEP it that way!
Finally, as a strategy professional, I realized quickly that this book is not really about strategy, which as Porter shows is a whole chain of operational activities geared toward the different positioning. This book is better titled "a book of lists of some successful products and services in the past 20 years, plus some trivial labels of where they were unique" because once you see beyond the superficial facade of the "value innovation process", this is what the book is all about: a list of some successful new products, created by companies and entrepreneurs who had the insight of how to be different. An insight as enigmatic after reading the book as it is before...
To apply the book's measure of "blue ocean innovation", it is not divergent from past books, nor focused on the real issues to justify its price. It does have a catchy tagline though, and like all quick fads, tagline is everything... I feel sorry for my hassled executive friends who are under severe pressure to compete and are hoping this book will help. It will not.
 Different Name Same Game May 5, 2006
33 out of 39 found this review helpful
I would not consider myself an astute strategist, but with the little reading and exposure to organizational strategy that I've done and been a part of over the past years, this book is nothing but a horse of another color.
This is a reiteration of work done by Michael Porter 25+ years ago. For an HBS book, I was incredibly disappointed. The authors use `fun' little metaphors with bloody oceans and smooth sailing blue waters and thus create a smoke and mirrors show to convince potential customers that they've developed a new unprecedented theory of business strategy. All they are doing is pedaling a differentiation strategy pioneered by Porter with an emphasis on innovation (one aspect of the differentiation set - e.g. branding, pricing, market niche).
If you've never read anything on competitive strategy, then it should be a fun read. If you have, don't waste your time. If you believe this is really a NEW strategy on which your organization can capitalize... then I've got a great deal on a bridge.
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