Blue Ocean Strategy was developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. They observed that companies tend to engage in head-to-head competition in search of sustained profitable growth. Yet in today’s overcrowded industries competing head-on results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Lasting success increasingly comes, not from battling competitors, but from creating blue oceans of untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.

Blue Ocean Strategy challenges everything you thought you knew about strategic success and provides a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant.

What is distinctive about blue ocean strategy as a theory? How is blue ocean strategy different from a classic differentiation strategy or a low cost strategy? What’s the research process behind Blue Ocean Strategy? How does it address the issue of execution? Which industries is it effective in? To address these and other questions, the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne capture the essence of blue ocean strategy in eight key points.

8 Key Points of Blue Ocean Strategy
1. It’s grounded in data
Blue ocean strategy, developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, is based on a decade-long study of more than 150 strategic moves spanning more than 30 industries over 100 years.

2. It pursues differentiation and low cost
Blue ocean strategy is based on the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost. It is an ‘and-and,’ not an ‘either-or’ strategy

3. It creates uncontested market space
Blue ocean strategy doesn’t aim to out-perform the competition. It aims to make the competition irrelevant by reconstructing industry boundaries

4. It empowers you through tools and frameworks
Blue ocean strategy offers systematic tools and frameworks to break away from the competition and create a blue ocean of uncontested market space
5. It provides a step-by-step process
From assessing the current state of play in an industry, to exploring the six paths to new market space, to understanding how to convert noncustomers into customers. Blue ocean strategy provides a clear four-step process to create your to-be blue ocean strategy

6. It maximizes opportunity while minimizing risk
The blue ocean idea index allows you to test the commercial viability of ideas and shows you how to refine ideas to maximize upside while minimizing downside risk

7. It builds execution into strategy
The process and tools are inclusive, easy to understand and communicate, and visual – all of which makes the process non-intimidating and an effective path to building execution into strategy and the collective wisdom of a company

8. It shows how to create a win-win outcome
As an integrated approach to strategy, blue ocean strategy shows how to align the three strategy propositions – value, profit, and people – to ensure organization is aligned around new strategy and that it creates a win for buyers, the company, and for employees and stakeholders