Based on a popular business book, the blue ocean strategy is practically an amalgam of techniques gathering together innovative solutions for futuristic industries that do not even exist yet. From this point of view, the world is split into two different oceans. The red one covers all the more or less significant industries existing today, while the blue one aims to anticipate the most attractive and profitable technologies of tomorrow. Practically, instead of growing by some world renowned standards and dealing with a tough competition, the blue ocean strategy aims to help you develop your own rules or uncontested market area, without any competition.
Value Innovation
The concept of value innovation hit the market in the ’90s and is strongly connected to the more modern blue ocean strategy. Basically, the innovation is supposed to float around your business and the market space you activate in. It focuses on the specific actions of your company, with the final goal to affect your profit, value and structure in a positive way. The change will not affect you only, but your entire customer database, including the clients you have not even met yet.
From many points of view, value innovation can be taken for a masterpiece. It is the art of making your competition lose its status, in the attempt to be alone on a profitable market. Your primary mission implies developing a leap in the value status of you and your clients, only to provide a new uncontested market space. Since you are alone, there is obviously no competition, while prosperity is only a matter of time.
Blue Ocean Strategy
The blue ocean strategy is not new at all. In fact, it is taken for a modernist version of the value innovation. The general idea behind this strategy is fairly simple to understand. To make a long story short, you need to bring something new. From this point of view, you can forget about running along with your competition and battling in innovations, offers or promotions. Instead of being in a constant struggle to survive on a generally saturated market, how about creating your own market? When you manage to establish a new demand in a new market, there is no room for your competition. Of course, this process is not going to be the longest lasting one, since others will follow your sample too. But then, you got the time, strategy and ideas in mind.
Benefits of the Blue Ocean Strategy
There are a series of benefits coming with the blue ocean strategy and the fact that you got no competition is by far the most enticing one. In the red ocean, everything stays in who can advertise more and louder. In the blue ocean, you are alone. As long as you manage to underline the demand, you do not even have to spend a fortune on marketing.
Second, the cost control is just as effective. However, this benefit is limited, since new participants will clearly join you later and push for the competition.