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Blue Ocean Strategy:
FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE
W. Chan Kim
Renée Mauborgne
F
or twenty-five years, competition has been at the heart of corporate strategy. Today, one can hardly speak of strategy without involving the language of competition: competitive strategy, competitive benchmarking, building competitive advantages, and beating the competition. Such focus on the competition traces back to corporate strategy’s roots in military strategy. The very language of corporate strategy is deeply imbued with military references—chief executive “officers” in “headquarters,”
“troops” on the “front lines,” and fighting over a defined battlefield.1
Industrial organization (IO) economics gave formal expression to the prominent importance of competition to firms’ success. IO economics suggests a causal flow from market structure to conduct and performance.2 Here, market structure, given by supply and demand conditions, shapes sellers’ and buyers’ conduct, which, in turn, determines end performance.3 The academics call this the structuralist view, or environmental determinism. Taking market structure as given, much as military strategy takes land as given, such a view drives companies to try to carve out a defensible position against the competition in the existing market space. To sustain themselves in the marketplace, practitioners of strategy focus on building advantages over the competition, usually by assessing what competitors do and striving to do it better. Here, grabbing a bigger share of the market is also seen as a zero-sum game in which one company’s gain is achieved at another company’s loss. Hence, competition, the supply side of the equation, remains the defining variable of strategy with the focus on dividing up existing industry space.
Adapted from BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the
Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. Copyright © 2005 by Harvard Business School Publishing
FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE
W. Chan Kim
Renée Mauborgne
F
or twenty-five years, competition has been at the heart of corporate strategy. Today, one can hardly speak of strategy without involving the language of competition: competitive strategy, competitive benchmarking, building competitive advantages, and beating the competition. Such focus on the competition traces back to corporate strategy’s roots in military strategy. The very language of corporate strategy is deeply imbued with military references—chief executive “officers” in “headquarters,”
“troops” on the “front lines,” and fighting over a defined battlefield.1
Industrial organization (IO) economics gave formal expression to the prominent importance of competition to firms’ success. IO economics suggests a causal flow from market structure to conduct and performance.2 Here, market structure, given by supply and demand conditions, shapes sellers’ and buyers’ conduct, which, in turn, determines end performance.3 The academics call this the structuralist view, or environmental determinism. Taking market structure as given, much as military strategy takes land as given, such a view drives companies to try to carve out a defensible position against the competition in the existing market space. To sustain themselves in the marketplace, practitioners of strategy focus on building advantages over the competition, usually by assessing what competitors do and striving to do it better. Here, grabbing a bigger share of the market is also seen as a zero-sum game in which one company’s gain is achieved at another company’s loss. Hence, competition, the supply side of the equation, remains the defining variable of strategy with the focus on dividing up existing industry space.
Adapted from BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the
Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. Copyright © 2005 by Harvard Business School Publishing