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.

"Kim and Mauborgne's blue ocean metaphor elegantly summarizes their vision of the kind of expanding, competitor-free markets that innovative companies can navigate. Unlike 'red oceans,' which are well explored and crowded with competitors, 'blue oceans' represent 'untapped market space' and the 'opportunity for highly profitable growth.' The only reason more big companies don't set sail for them, they suggest, is that 'the dominant focus of strategy work over the past twenty-five years has been on competition-based red ocean strategies'-i.e., finding new ways to cut costs and grow revenue by taking away market share from the competition. With this groundbreaking book, Kim and Mauborgne-both professors at France's INSTEAD, the second largest business school in the world-aim to repair that bias. Using dozens of examples-from Southwest Airlines and the Cirque du Soleil to Curves and Starbucks-they present the tools and frameworks they've developed specifically for the task of analyzing blue oceans. They urge companies to 'value innovation' that focuses on 'utility, price, and cost positions,' to 'create and capture new demand' and to 'focus on the big picture, not the numbers.' And while their heavyweight analytical tools may be of real use only to serious strategy planners, their overall vision will inspire entrepreneurs of all stripes, and most of their ideas are presented in a direct, jargon-free manner. Theirs is not the typical business management book's vague call to action; it is a precise, actionable plan for changing the way companies do business with one resounding piece of advice: swim for open waters." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Kim and Mauborgne present a non-competitive approach for achieving high business growth through the development of uncontested market space with practically limitless potential. Drawing upon a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than 100 years and thirty industries, they explain how "value innovation" renders rivals obsolete and creates new demand. The authors teach strategy and management at INSEAD in Fontainebleu, France.
Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

This landmark work upends traditional thinking about strategy, and explains how to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant while charting a new path to capture new market space that is ripe for growth.

A landmark work that upends traditional thinking about strategy, and charts a new path to capture new market space that is ripe for growth.