Blue Ocean Strategy

The first Chapter of this book introduces the concept of blue ocean strategy as against red ocean strategy. Red being the intense fight for a share of the existing market and blue being the creation of a new market. At the outset this sounds very similar to Professor Christensen's disruptive innovation strategy. The book also mentions the idea of value innovation. It is mentioned just focusing on value will lead to incremental value which is similar to sustaining innovation and just focusing on innovation may lead to innovation that doesn't necessarily drive customer value. This is similar to trying to create a product to do a job that people don't need done. 

This book talks about blue ocean as something that increases the value delivered to the buyer at the same time reducing cost. It does get a bit confusing when the target customers are currently non consumers. The disruptive innovation approach was reduction of cost and ease of use by decoupling and dropping some of the features that the new set of customers really do not need to reduce their cost and ease of use. Here, we are looking to drive greater value as well as reduce cost. Would be curious to see what value. If the product is used to get a totally different job done for the new customers, it would be interesting to see how value can be compared.

The book wants to make strategy as the right category for comparing businesses and not companies or industries. A strategy being a product roadmap decision at a particular point of time. The authors point out how products and services continuously come and go. So a company can't create a product and service and stay complacent in their execution excellence. This is similar to the concept of commoditization and de-commoditization. 

Can see some elements of integrated architecture versus modular architecture as well in the example given of Cirque du Soliel. Of how they were able to combine the components of theater, ballet and circus in a new way to create a new value proposition for new set of customers not served by the three existing products. This recombination element was something not covered in Professor Christensen's book. So that would be interesting to explore.