Want FREE Templates on Organization, Change, & Culture? Download our FREE compilation of 50+ slides. This is an exclusive promotion being run on LinkedIn.











BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY

Blue Ocean Strategy is a Growth, Innovation, and Value Creation framework focused on the idea of creating an uncontested market space—i.e. a "blue ocean."










Blue Ocean Strategy is a Growth Strategy, Innovation Management, and Value Creation framework focused on the idea of creating an uncontested market space—i.e. a "blue ocean." This strategic framework is very innovative, as its principles challenge the conventional business strategy principles of fighting competitors head-on. The Blue Ocean Strategy framework evolved from a framework called Value Innovation developed by Kim and Mauborgne in the late 90s.


Comparison Conventional Strategic Thinking vs. Blue Ocean Strategy Thinking

Source: Harvard Business Review, C. Kim, R. Mauborgne (1997)

If you are interested in elevating your organization to Excellence in both Strategy and Innovation, take a look at our Stream offerings below:

For more frameworks on Growth, take a look at our Growth Strategy Toolkit.


Blue Ocean vs. Red Ocean. What's the meaning behind the name?

In red oceans, our efforts are focused on the conventional logic that we must outpace the competition with a better solution to a given problem. Blue ocean strategy invites us to redefine the problem itself. It does so by breaking the value-cost trade-off in view of creating new uncontested market places. Places where no one has been and where we would be the one defining the rules!

The Analytical Tools & Frameworks

The strategy canvas is both the start and the end point of a Blue Ocean Strategy formulation. An initial value curve depicts where the industry competes on and invests in. It is then transformed via the eliminate-reduce-raise-create actions framework. The resulting value curve shows a focused effort that diverges from existing market offerings and can be easily translated into a compelling tagline.

Core Underlying Principles

Venturing beyond an existing industry space implies a series of risks. The blue ocean strategy approach to strategy is based on six principles that cater for the major risks of a new market creation project: search risk, planning risk, scale risk, business model risk, organizational risk and management risk. Together, they define the underlying philosophy of blue oceans.

Value Innovation

At the heart of Blue Ocean Strategy, we have concept of Value Innovation. Value without innovation tends to focus on value creation on an incremental scale, i.e. something that improves value but is not sufficient to make us really stand out in the marketplace. Innovation without value tends to be technology-driven, market pioneering, or futuristic, often shooting beyond what buyers are ready to accept and pay for.

Value innovation occurs only if we align innovation with utility, price, and cost positions. The focus here is not time-to-market, bleeding-edge technology or best practices. It is the ambition to break one of the most commonly accepted dogmas of competition-based strategy: the value-cost trade-off.

It is conventionally believed that companies can either create greater value to customers at a higher cost, or create reasonable value at a lower cost. Here, strategy is seen as making a choice between differentiation and cost. In contrast, to create blue oceans, we need to pursue differentiation and low cost simultaneously, by looking within and beyond our industry boundaries and redefining a market altogether.

Instead of focusing on beating the competition, value innovation focuses on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and our company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space. The objective here is not to increase our competitiveness in the market as we know it. Rather, it is to create a whole new market where the rules of the games are yet to be created, by us!

You can learn more about this strategy framework, including analytical tools and case studies, in the three showcased documents below in blue.

  Complete Guide to Strategy Consulting Frameworks

This robust document presents a myriad of consulting frameworks used by Strategy Consulting firms, showcasing Blue Ocean Strategy, as well as a number of complementary frameworks on Strategy, Growth, and Innovation. The full collection range from ones pioneered by renown strategists (e.g. Michael Porter, Bruce Henderson, Peter Drucker) to global strategy consultancies (e.g. McKinsey, BCG, Booz).

 
$99.00


Add to Cart View Details

This is a partial preview of the full document.

  Design Thinking

In today's Digital Age, customers are increasingly choosing products and services based on the quality of the experiences they have with them. To help meet these challenges, organizations rey on an approach known as "Design Thinking." Design Thinking is a human-centered, iterative problem solving process of discovery, ideation, and experimentation that employs various design-based techniques to gain insight and yield innovative solutions for virtually any type of organizational or business challenge.

 
$89.00


Add to Cart View Details

This is a partial preview of the full document.

  Business Model Innovation

Innovative business models can reshape industries and drive tremendous growth. However, many organization find business model innovation difficult. The framework outlined in this presentation explains a structured process to innovating your business model. Topics covered in customer value proposition, profit formula, and key resources & processes.

 
$39.00


Add to Cart View Details

This is a partial preview of the full document.

MORE STRATEGY, GROWTH, & INNOVATION BEST PRACTICES





CUSTOMER TESTIMONIALS

  •  
    "If you are looking for great resources to save time with your business presentations, Flevy is truly a value-added resource. Flevy has done all the work for you and we will continue to utilize Flevy as a source to extract up-to-date information and data for our virtual and onsite presentations!"

    – Debbi Saffo, President at The NiKhar Group
  •  
    "As a consulting firm, we had been creating subject matter training materials for our people and found the excellent materials on Flevy, which saved us 100's of hours of re-creating what already exists on the Flevy materials we purchased."

    – Michael Evans, Managing Director at Newport LLC
  •  
    "The wide selection of frameworks is very useful to me as an independent consultant. In fact, it rivals what I had at my disposal at Big 4 Consulting firms in terms of efficacy and organization."

    – Julia T., Consulting Firm Owner (Former Manager at Deloitte and Capgemini)
  •  
    "As an Independent Management Consultant, I find Flevy to add great value as a source of best practices, templates and information on new trends. Flevy has matured and the quality and quantity of the library is excellent. Lastly the price charged is reasonable, creating a win-win value for the customer, Flevy and the various authors. This is truly a service that benefits the consulting industry and associated clients. Thanks for providing this service. "

    – Jim Schoen, Principal at FRC Group
  •  
    "As a small business owner, the resource material available from FlevyPro has proven to be invaluable. The ability to search for material on demand based our project events and client requirements was great for me and proved very beneficial to my clients. Importantly, being able to easily edit and tailor the material for specific purposes helped us to make presentations, knowledge sharing, and toolkit development, which formed part of the overall program collateral. While FlevyPro contains resource material that any consultancy, project or delivery firm must have, it is an essential part of a small firm or independent consultant's toolbox."

    – Michael Duff, Managing Director at Change Strategy (UK)
  •  
    "My FlevyPro subscription provides me with the most popular frameworks and decks in demand in today’s market. They not only augment my existing consulting and coaching offerings and delivery, but also keep me abreast of the latest trends, inspire new products and service offerings for my practice, and educate me in a fraction of the time and money of other solutions. I strongly recommend FlevyPro to any consultant serious about success."

    – Bill Branson, Founder at Strategic Business Architects
  •  
    "FlevyPro has been a brilliant resource for me, as an independent growth consultant, to access a vast knowledge bank of presentations to support my work with clients. In terms of RoI, the value I received from the very first presentation I downloaded paid for my subscription many times over! The quality of the decks available allows me to punch way above my weight – it's like having the resources of a Big 4 consultancy at your fingertips at a microscopic fraction of the overhead."

    – Roderick Cameron, Founding Partner at SGFE Ltd
  •  
    "I like your product. I'm frequently designing PowerPoint presentations for my company and your product has given me so many great ideas on the use of charts, layouts, tools, and frameworks. I really think the templates are a valuable asset to the job."

    – Roberto Fuentes Martinez, Senior Executive Director at Technology Transformation Advisory




SELECT CUSTOMERS
Since 2012, we have provided best practices to over 10,000 businesses and organizations of all sizes across the world—in over 130 countries. Below is just a very small sample of our customer base.



Did you know?
The average daily rate of a McKinsey consultant is $6,625 (not including expenses). The average price of a Flevy document is $65.



Download our FREE Strategy & Transformation Framework Templates

Download our free compilation of 50+ Strategy & Transformation slides and templates. Frameworks include McKinsey 7-S Strategy Model, Balanced Scorecard, Disruptive Innovation, BCG Experience Curve, and many more.