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W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne are professors of strategy at INSEAD and co-directors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute. They have produced a second edition of their best-selling book, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015), with three new chapters and a new introduction.
The original version of the book, published in 2005, introduced and defined the theory and practice of blue ocean strategy - a unique methodology for creating commercially relevant new market space - which it supported with frameworks and analytic tools. Almost immediately the concepts of "blue ocean" and "red ocean" strategies were being tossed around in management meetings in companies across the globe.[1] However, managers' mental models, which are based on their backgrounds and pre-existing knowledge, sometimes led them to confuse blue ocean strategy with disruption theory, niche marketing, customer-focused innovation and other pioneering practices. To get the most out of the blue ocean strategy methodologies and tools, an accurate understanding on the underpinning concepts that guide their proper application is essential. For guidance, Robert M. Randall, Editor of Strategy & Leadership , asked Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne to differentiate blue ocean strategy from various other approaches to strategic marketing and innovation.
Strategy & Leadership
Does implementing a blue ocean strategy start by focusing on the unserved needs of current customers?
Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
A blue ocean strategist gains insights about reconstructing market boundaries not by looking at existing customers, but by exploring noncustomers. When organizations mistakenly assume that blue ocean strategy is about being customer led, they reflexively focus on what they've always focused on: existing customers and how to make them happier. While such a perspective may shed insight on ways to improve value for current industry customers, it is not the path to create new demand. To create new demand, an organization needs to turn its focus to noncustomers and why they refuse to patronize an industry. Noncustomers, not customers, hold the greatest insight into an industry's pain points and points of intimidation that limit the size and boundary of the industry.
S&L
To create blue oceans, must a company venture beyond its core business?
Kim and Mauborgne
There is a common...