Blue Ocean Strategy

"Corporate Strategy"

Blue Ocean Strategy is a corporate strategy and bestselling business book written by Professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, of INSEAD.

Who are they

alt text W. Chan Kim is The BCG Chair Professor of Strategy and International Management at INSEAD. He was a professor at the University of Michigan Business School. He has served as a board member as well as an advisor for a number of multinational corporations in Europe, the U.S. and Pacific Asia. He is an advisory member for the European Union and a Fellow of the World Economic Forum.

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Renée Mauborgne is The INSEAD Distinguished Fellow and a professor of strategy and management at INSEAD, France. Mauborgne is a fellow of the World Economic Forum. Her Harvard Business Review articles, co-authored with W. Chan Kim, are worldwide bestsellers and have sold over half a million reprints. Their Value Innovation and Fair Process articles were selected as among the best classic articles ever published in Harvard Business Review.

What is Blue Ocean Strategy

In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne argue that tomorrow’s leading companies will succeed not by battling competitors, but by creating “blue oceans” of uncontested market space ripe for growth.

BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY provides a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant. In this frame-changing book, Kim and Mauborgne present a proven analytical framework and the tools for successfully creating and capturing blue oceans.

Key Concepts

Blue Ocean Strategy is the result of a decade-long study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than 30 industries over 100 years (1880-2000).
Blue Ocean Strategy is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost.
The aim of BOS is not to out-perform the competition in the existing industry, but to create new market space or a blue ocean, thereby making the competition irrelevant.
BOS offers a set of methodologies and tools to create new market space.
While innovation has been seen as a random/experimental process where entrepreneurs and spin-offs are the primary drivers – as argued by Schumpeter and his followers – BOS offers systematic and reproducible methodologies and processes in pursuit of innovation by both new and existing firms.
BOS frameworks and tools include: strategy canvas, value curve, four actions framework, six paths, buyer experience cycle, buyer utility map, and blue ocean idea index.
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.
BOS covers both strategy formulation and strategy execution. The three key conceptual building blocks of BOS are: value innovation, tipping point leadership, and fair process.

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