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Blue Ocean Strategy Discoveries For Startups
The hustle, the noise, Dragons Den style panels ready to turf you out on the street for being so presumptuous as to call yourself a business.
The reigning narrative, often true, is that entrepreneurs and business owners should buckle up for sleepless nights and a torrent of agonising challenges.
Some may make you; most will sink you.
But not in Blue Oceans Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant by Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim.
Written in 2005, Blue Ocean Strategy provides a set of tools and frameworks to reorientate organisations away from super competitive, price-cutting, bloody red oceans behaviour and into more serene waters where they can focus on value innovation over the competition.
While the book’s case studies are mostly large B2C organisations like Swatch, Cirque du Soleil, and Southwest Airlines, the underlying philosophies apply to businesses of any size.
And, for those small, autonomous outfits who are their own decision-makers, you may find there are fewer barriers to trying out a new business mindset.
So, below I explore three activities from the book while looking at a successful London Startup.
