If You Want To Succeed - Forget Competition

Why Blue Ocean Strategy Pushes Boundaries Beyond Competition 

Photo by Matt Lee on Unsplash 

Unlike conventional business strategy, Blue Ocean Strategy doesn’t aim to out-perform completion. Instead it focuses on unleashing creativity that brings real buyer value and renders competition irrelevant.

But why shouldn’t you focus on competition? After all, if you know who your rivals are and why they are succeeding, all you have to do is improve or differentiate slightly and you will gain an advantage. This works if you want to be an imitator, satisfied with being just another name on the list. If, on the other hand, you want to truly stand out and make a difference, you need to innovate. Think about it this way:

In a market full of competition, customers see a range of similar products and services, only slightly different from one another. Without having any meaningful alternative, they reluctantly accept what’s on offer, but only until something truly amazing comes along. It’s like having 150 TV channels and not having anything to watch. Then comes Youtube, and suddenly one player has revolutionised the whole industry.

That’s the power of Blue Ocean Strategy. You don’t want to be the 139th TV channel on a bored viewer’s list. You want to be Youtube. Am I right?

So here is how you create the competition-free, uncontested market space:  
1) Don’t accept set industry boundaries. They have been created by individuals and can, therefore, be reshaped by them as well. As Steve Jobs put it "You get told that the world is the way it is…But that’s a very limited view. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. <…> Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it."

For those who are not the intuitive geniuses Steve Jobs was, reshaping industry boundaries has to be done in a systematic way. This will maximise return and minimise risk.  

The systematic tools and frameworks of Blue Ocean Strategy (like the ERRC grid or the Strategy Canvas), and the 5 step process of Blue Ocean Shift have been designed to achieve this goals. They have been based on over 30 years of research and have been proven successful to over 200 for-profit, non-profit, government organisations, startups and established companies. They can help you too, given that you understand and apply them correctly. I will be going through them all in the coming posts so watch this space.

2) Use the tools and frameworks to value innovate. Value innovation is the key point of Blue Ocean Strategy. It’s the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost. To anyone familiar with conventional business strategy practices this seems counterintuitive: how can you lower costs and bring prices down while increasing on aspects customers value most, like quality, sustainability and convenience? Blue Ocean Strategy shows that it is possible. #Bitcoin is a good example.  

As the first mainstream digital, decentralised currency, Bitcoin has the potential to change the financial industry. Before it came on the market, we had to rely solely on money issued by central authorities, which is highly susceptible to manipulation and comes with a myriad of fees and regulations. Although centralised banking systems are well developed, providing convenience and a certain security agains fraud, Bitcoin, being a truly global currency, with little potential for manipulation, low fees, greater privacy, and (at least at the moment) incredible ROI, means that it has become a true alternative to traditional currencies and a growing interest for investors.
Bitcoin differentiates agains the competitors, providing value, AND is low cost in terms of fees (see the Strategy Canvas below for a visual representation of the point).

‘Create - don’t compete’ is the underlying mantra of Blue Ocean Strategy and I’m excited to see that the #steemit community already lives by it! I believe that we can help each other create many Blue Oceans and build a vibrant #BlueOcean community! So if you found this content useful or interesting, and you think others can benefit from learning more about Blue Ocean Strategy, please feel free to ask questions, comment, and share.  

Disclaimer:  All of the content on this blog is and will be inspired and based on the work of Professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, the authors of global best-sellers Blue Ocean Strategy and Blue Ocean Shift: Beyond Competing. I am in no way affiliated with them, and have not been sponsored to write this content. I am a true fan, enthusiast and an evangelist, believing that the more people become familiar with their ideas and put them to practice, the better and more prosperous all of our lives will be. For more information on the authors, their work, and the books please visit www.blueoceanstrategy.com