 I just finished reading Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. I originally started this book as part of the Smarter Product Managers book club – join us!), but real-life got in the way and I fell painfully behind. However, I was thoroughly enjoying the book and continued through it.
First, the red and blue ocean concept is very simple. Red oceans are well known and typically crowded with competitors where as blue oceans represent a potentially new market with a real opportunity and no competitors (we know there are always competitors). The book was organized into two parts, first discovering a blue ocean and the second formulating a blue ocean strategy. In the simplest summary, maybe too simple, discovering a blue ocean seems to consist of finding new opportunities within your market that extend your offering (i.e. product, feature, solution, etc.) beyond where solutions exist today. The take-away from this is that you need to be open to (and probably exclusively focused on) the possibility that the market needs do not exist today and some market sensing will need to be executed. Basically, I like to spell ‘blue ocean’ like this I-N-N-O-V-A-T-I-O-N One term I really liked from the book was ‘value innovation’. They define ‘value innovation’ as a process that focuses on value creation. Not rocket science but that extra word, value, really helps keep you focused on your innovation, now value innovation, activities. Overall, this was a decent read. I picked up some interesting new terms and some best-practices on uncovering potential opportunities. I also learned bits and pieces about sequencing strategy (utility, price [2], cost and adoption), overcoming organizational hurdles (leadership) and building execution (fair process[3]) into your strategy. [1] If you are interested in another product management related review – including working examples of the tools, please read Personas Make Blue Ocean Strategy Proactive on the Tyner Blain blog. [2] Interesting discussion in the book about determining target price and then using that to shape the cost. Not vice-versa. [3] Fair process builds execution into strategy by creating people’s buy-in up front. Image source: Amazon.com, Inc. |
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. That being said, the first section offered some interesting tools and suggestion for analyzing your market and contrasting your offering with your competitors to identify where you are successful and potentially competing to your own red ocean death. See footnote [1] for more information on those tools. The second part of this book runs through some basic strategy concepts for formulating the strategy.
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