Customer Rating: 
Summary: Assumption Busting
Comment: I have been paying attention to the work of Kim and Mauborgne, since they published their first articles in the Harvard Business Review. The thinking they have developed since those days, i.e. building a strategy canvas, accessing non-users of your company's products, and then devising a process to create a blue ocean strategy expand one's ability to apply their ideas.
Building a strategy canvas, however, is a lot harder than it looks. I've tried, with varying levels of success. Discovering the elements of your differentiation is more than half the battle. It's not so difficult to look at an already innovative product or service and abstract back to the strategy canvas. But, starting from scratch and developing your own, means paying attention to the blocking and tackling of Blue Ocean Strategies: Reconstructing Market Boundaries, fund in Chapter 3. In it, the authors identify the six paths to Blue Ocean Strategies. They are to look across Industry, Strategic Group, Buyer Group, Scope of Product, Functional/Emotional Orientation and Time. But one they left one out, which was in their original thinking. It is simply to look across Borders. Ask how do they do it in Spain or China? Just understanding how the healthcare system works in France, for example, can provide huge insights into anyone who sells products or services to in that industry anywhere in the world. I also find 'Crossing Borders' to be the easiest way to find the assumptions you have about your business model. This is the key starting point in how to create Blue Oceans.
(see [.....] for more information).
Understanding the 'how's' of Blue Ocean Strategy, like most things, let's you apply it rather than just to understand what the authors mean.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Jake Olsen's Review of Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
Comment: Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R284Y5A1JGFA8I Jake Olsen's review was made as part of a critical review assignment for the Fall 2008 Honors Colloquium on Creative Destruction at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, taught by Art Diamond. (The course syllabus stated that part of the critical review assignment consisted of the making of a video recording of the review, and the posting of the review to Amazon.)
Customer Rating: 
Summary: The mother of reinvention...
Comment: This book helps focus the reader on looking at their business, competition and offerings in different and exciting ways. If you are considering a new business venture or product offering, you really should read this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Strategy will always include opportunity and risk
Comment: Strategy:
1. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. Companies need to go beyond competing. To seize new profit and growth opportunities, they also need to create blue oceans.
2. Put the clock forward 20 to 50 years and ask yourself how many unknown industries will exist. Surprisingly, many of the unknown industries will exist.
3. Value innovation is focusing on making competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for your buyers and you company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space.
4. Value innovation is neither cutting edge technology nor timing of the market. Value innovation occurs when companies align with utility, price, and cost positions. "If the companies fail to anchor innovation with value in this way, technology innovators and market pioneers often lay eggs that other companies hatch."
5. Blue ocean innovation seeks differentiation and low cost simulataneously. The goal is too drive costs down while simulataneously driving value up for buyers.
6. Utility alignment starts at the top. Production innovation may improve subsystem performance without impacting the company's overall strategy. The production costs savings do not realign the utility proposition of the company. The product cost saving reinforce strategic leadership validating the status quo. "Although innovations of this sort may help to secure and even lift a company's position in the existing market space, such a subsystem approach will rarely create a blue ocean of new market opportunity." Market opportunity results from changing the utility proposition.
7. Red ocean strategy assumes that an industrial structural condition are given and that firms are forced to compete within them, a structuralist or environmental determinism view. In contrast, value innovation is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not given and can be reconstructed by actions and beliefs of industry players.
8. In red ocean, differentiation costs because fimrs compete with the same best practice rule. In recontructionist world, the strategic aim is to create new best-practice rules by breaking the existing value cost trade-off and thereby create a blue ocean.
9. Strategy will always include opportunity and risk.
New markets:
1. How to conceive a new market space: a. Look across alternative industries b. look across strategic groups within industries c. redefine the industry buyer group d. look across to complementary product and services e. rethink the functional-emotional orientation of the industry f. participate in shaping external trends over time.
2. Emotionally oriented industries offer many extras that add price without enhancing functionality. Stripping away these extras may create a fundamentally simpler, lower-priced, lower-cost business model that customer will welcome.
3. Products and services that have different forms but offer the same functionality are substitutes for each other. Alternatives include products and services that have different functions and form but serve the same purpose. Alternatives are broader than substitutes.
4. A strategic group is a group of companies within an industry that pursue a similar strategy. Strategic groups can be ranked in a rough hierarchy according to price and performance. Most companies focus on improving their competitive position within a strategic group. "The key to creating a blue ocean across existing strategic groups is to break out of this narrow tunnel vision by understanding which factors determine customer decisions to trade up or down from one group to another."
5. Individual companies in an industry often target different customer segments. An industry typically converges on a single buyer group. "Challenging an industry's conventional wisdom about which buyer group to target can lead to the discovery of new blue oceans."
6. Untapped value is often hidden in complementary products and services. The key is to define the total solution buyers seek when they choose a product or service. A simple way is to think about what happens before, during, and after your product is used.
7. All industries are subject to external trends that affect their businesses over time. Looking at these trends with the right perspective can show you how to create blue ocean opportunities. Most companies adapt incrementally or passively as events emerge. They pace their own actions to keep up with the development of the trend they are tracking. Key insights occur by discovering how trends will change value to the customer and impact the company's business model. Look for the value a market will deliver today to the value it will deliver tomorrow - "managers can actively shape their future and lay claim to a new blue ocean." The trends must be decisive to your business; they must be irreversible; and they must have a clear trajectory
Customer Rating:
Summary: Blue Ocean
Comment: About half way through. Not a book you can't put down but good airplane reading. Makes you think about different strategies so worth it.
|
