Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

I have read many business books and am an MBA from University of Maryland, Smith School of Business (a great program), so I have also read many business textbooks. This book is not a textbook, but has a systematic approach that entrepreneurs can use in developing lines of business or recreating them in a profitable manner. I particular like that it does not use a "wild west" approach but still encourages you to explore and take risks, just calculated risks. Beginning in 2025, our startup of a bootstrap business has made great use of this older book with weekly meetings on each chapter and the book assigned business development/idea activities. Using Blue Oceans, our startup is now making significant dollars and paying employee salaries. It takes time (~ 6 months) to properly work through this awesome book (not simply read it), but if you want a better shot at succeeding while minimizing costs and unlocking new business development ideas, this book is the pinnacle of great. I hear "Blue Ocean Strategy, Enhanced Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space" is being released in ~May 2026. Note that I am 100% unaffiliated with this book and do not know the author.

I am a software engineer starting an automotive advertising business. I have been edifying myself on business over the last year, absorbing all the business info I can from reading books and talking to people. I have to say that this book has been the most helpful, with its out-of-the-box thinking backed with solid real world examples and powerful, simple, and implementable strategies. Most books that address the issues of competing in a crowded market concentrate on how to develop a niche and focus a those customers that demand it. This book addresses this issue from a whole different angle, and very elegantly I might add. The authors tell you to identify all the factors that your competitors (and you) currently compete on. Decide which factors you will eliminate and reduce, factors that reduce margins, etc. Then, focus your efforts on innovating new business factors; factors where you will not go head to head with your competition, yet offer the customer added benefits. There are so many real examples in the book along with their six strategy process that I immediately thought of a few new business factors for my upcoming business. Diverging from the status quo, in effect, moves you from the violent red ocean into the calm blue ocean. Then you need to create a barrier to your newly created ocean. If the new business factors are patentable, required large/existing/non-attainable assets, or created some other natural barrier to the market, then your safe for awhile. Otherwise you will need to use strategic pricing as your barrier, like South West Airlines did. Strategic pricing (process detailed in the book) and creating new business factors (customer benefits) IS value-innovation! This is giving the customer more for less and can only happen in the blue ocean. Companies would go broke doing this in the red ocean! Strategic pricing will help you set your price low enough that you will attract customers from the red ocean and your newly created business factors may even attract customers that were previously non-existent. The execution of your strategy must be very swift and focused, trying to gain as much market share as quickly as possible and making it tough for competitors to enter your blue ocean, much like Microsoft and Wal-Mart have done. This strategy totally goes against the traditional "find a niche, concentrate on select customers", in-the-box kind of thinking that I have been accustomed to reading for the last year. I really love this book and could go on and on. I would easily have paid many times more for this book, as it has become an asset to my new business. As a software guy, all problems look like software problems (if the customers don't like it, add more bells and whistles, etc.). Well, I think this book has finally got me thinking like a business savvy exec.

As a strategy consultant, I am always looking for new methods, frameworks, and tools related to corporate strategy. This book, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, presents a simple, cohesive, and practical framework to think about value innovation and corporate strategy. The core concepts of the book, red oceans and blue oceans, are intuitive and lead to interesting insights. The authors present some unique case studies and provide a plethora of visual tools and strategies to implement blue ocean concepts. So what are red oceans and blue oceans? Red oceans are contested market space where existing competitors struggle with each other for customers and profit. This ocean that they exist in is bloodied by competition, and is not where you want your company to be. Blue oceans are uncontested market space, pools of demand and customers that have not been reached by any competitor. The reason for this is that the blue ocean is masked by conventional wisdom and product/service design. To open blue oceans, companies must look at their products, customers, non-customers, and industry in new ways. This book provides tools to accomplish this and illustrates them well with examples such as Cirque Du Soliel and Southwest Airlines. The book has been criticized for being simplistic, catchy, and for borrowing concepts from others. However, when you look at corporate strategy, it is a field which has been examined thoroughly and completely. Hundreds of frameworks, concepts, and tools have been developed and re-hashed. When I think about strategy, this is not the only framework I'm going to use, which is okay. I'm not looking for one solution to all problems. What this book provides is a fresh way of looking at competitive strategy and some simple tools. This book is not a weighty tome, is quick to read, and is easy to understand. This is something I relish. As a strategy consultant, I work alongside my clients to critique current strategies and develop strategies for the future. In that context, simple is better. This book tries to keep things simple and does not bog things down with weighty research and financial analysis. To some, this will be a deal-breaker. There are strategy people out there who think that coming up with presentation full of scientific looking research methodologies and reams of spreadsheet analysis means they've done their job. This is not the case. Developing a blue ocean strategy is not a simple process. You should do your due diligence and consider financial analysis and market projections. However, you cannot let these things bog you down. This is why so many strategies fail or are never implemented. This book is not a panacea which will show you how to dominate your market. It isn't meant to be. What you will gain from this book is another way of thinking about strategy, some useful tools, and case studies to illustrate how to use things. The rest is up to you. Key Reasons To Buy: * Concise and easy to understand * Presents intuitive and applicable concepts related to strategy and innovation * Provides tools and case studies to illustrate concepts as well as conceive/execute blue ocean strategy on your own Perceived Weaknesses: * Some frameworks are derivative in nature * Research is not rigorous or quantitative

Blue Ocean strategy “Blue Ocean Strategy” by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne is definitely a good read for imminent strategists. What is Blue Ocean's strategy? – It is all about - a) Creating uncontested market space. b) Making competition irrelevant c) Creating and capturing new demand d) Breaking the value–cost trade-off e) Aligning the entire system in pursuit of differentiation and lost cost. It turns on the head the erstwhile principle that states high pricing and high cost only create value The four-legged principle of a Blue Ocean strategy is eye-opening: 1. Eliminate 2. Reduce 3. Raise 4. Create All the principles need to work together for the new path-breaking strategy to be implemented. The sequence of the Blue Ocean strategy revolves around the below four steps: 1. Buyer utility 2. Strategic pricing 3. Target costing 4. Adoption hurdles It is good to wrap your head around the contents, it will certainly give a ripple effect.

This book is an absolute must-have for anyone in a startup or really small or medium sized business. There is nothing that disturbs me more than people who struggle in business with their fingers in their ears swimming in a red ocean. In Canada we have a lot of monkey-see-monkey-do businesses that rely on continuous rounds of big government money and meandering from one tech bubbles to the next to survive and it drives me nuts. This book is the solution.

Great Book for Bussiness

Excelente libro para mejorar las ventas Crea una nueva visión de cómo vender en estos tiempos modernos. No solo se enfoca en lo convencional, también le da importancia al trabajo interno en la empresa

Ottimo libro con buoni spunti. un MUST da leggere.