What is Blue Ocean Strategy?

Rather than fighting competitors to the death over a shrinking profit pool, creating bloody red oceans, advocates of the strategy suggest "creating blue oceans of untapped new market spaces ripe for growth" to win more profitable business.

Where have you heard about Blue Ocean Strategy?

If you've ever heard someone talking about putting clear blue water between them and their rivals in anything from politics to sport it is applying a similar concept. The strategy offers ways of creating that space.

What you need to know about Blue Ocean Strategy.

Blue Ocean Strategy was developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. They looked at data to discover at what made some companies in 30 industries successful over 100 years. Having crunched the data they came up with a step-by-step process to find new spaces in the market and to converting new customers.

Companies can go for two options:

• launch completely new industries, as eBay did with online auctions
• expands the boundary of an existing industry - create a blue ocean inside a red ocean

Along with their strategy, Kim and Mauborgne created a series of tools, frameworks and methodologies that a company can apply to evaluate how to create a Blue Ocean Strategy.