Yesterday I finished reading “Blue Ocean Strategy (How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant)” by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.
The book explores the authors’ 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.
Using dozens of examples, from Southwest Airlines and the Cirque du Soleil to Curves and Starbucks, they present the approaches these companies took to open new doors for their businesses and reach out to satisfy untapped demand.
The key to create these “blue oceans” and navigate away from the fierce competition and into very profitable waters is through what they call “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.
The book isn’t just talk and theory, it actually provides a set of tools and frameworks businesses can use to develop their own “blue ocean” strategies. It’s more of a guidebook and action plan.
I personally found it to be a really great business book and very thought inspiring. A must-read for everyone involved in running a business.
Thanks to my friend Bilel for telling me about and lending me this book. I’m certainly going to buy a copy for myself. It’s very well worth it.
[Amazon: Blue Ocean Strategy]