Blue Ocean Shift

Any company can move out of a “red ocean” of intense competition and into a new value-cost market space – a wide-open “blue ocean.” Doing so requires completing five steps, each of which yields valuable insights into the structure of the industry and the company’s particular vulnerabilities. The shift of a company’s culture, product portfolio, and strategy from a red ocean to a blue ocean is the transformation process introduced in “Blue Ocean Shift.” A shift starts with a Pioneer-Migrator-Settler map, to get a good view of your current offerings, followed by creating a picture of the state-of-play in the industry with a Strategy Map. Next, delve into the actual experience of your customers and what they really want with a Buyer Utility Map, and identify how the total demand landscape for your offering could be expanded. With this information, the team can dive into systematic field research, using six paths that will enable them to decide what to eliminate, reduce, raise or create and so reconstruct the boundaries of the industry. Finally, after holding a Blue Ocean Fair and drawing up a new business model, the company will be ready to roll out its Blue Ocean Shift. Established bureaucratic companies, companies in regulated industries, or even government agencies surrounded in red-tape, can open up and create new blue oceans. Blue Ocean Shift not only provides a recipe to identify and transition companies into blue oceans but also focuses on the human-side (or “humanness”) of a transition. It does this by introducing many strategies and tactics that help shift the culture of an organization from its current state to one will allow any organization to welcome a shift.