Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant [Gebundene Ausgabe]

 

 

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Blue Ocean Strategy ist einer der populärwissenschaftlichen Management Bestseller der letzten Jahre. Der Begriff Blue Ocean Strategy wurde zu einem der Management Buzzwords schlechthin.

Worum geht es bzw. was wird in diesem Buch beschrieben?

Blue Ocean Strategy soll eine spezielle Strategie sein, die auf Wachstum und die Schaffung neuer Märkte fokussiert ist. Der Blue Ocean ist also ein neuer Markt, der durch ein neues Produkt oder eine neue Dienstleistung geschaffen wird. Hierdurch kann ein Unternehmen (angeblich) seine bisherigen Wettbewerber abschütteln bzw. diese irrelevant machen, da man sich einen neuen Markt und daher eine neue Nachfrage schafft. Man soll sowohl auf hohen Wert (für den Kunden) als auch auf niedrige Preise fixiert sein, also sowohl als differenzierter als auch als 'low cost' Anbieter positioniert sein. Als Beispiele werden Soutwest Airlines (erster Billigflieger in den USA), Nokia oder der Cirque de Soleil genannt.
Dem wird der Red Ocean gegenübergestellt. Die Charakteristiken des Red Ocean: Ein bereits bestehender Makrt, in welchem sich ein Unternehmen darauf fixiert den bestehenden Wettbewerb zu schlagen, es warden hier bereits bestehende Nachfrageportentiale ausgeschöpft, keine neuen geschaffen. Man positioniert sich entweder als 'low cost' oder als differenzierter Anbieter.

Soweit der Inhalt. Für mich stellt sich die Frage, in wie weit dies tatsächlich etwas Neues ist oder ob hier nur alter Wein in neuen Schleuchen aufgetischt wird. Das man einen neuen Markt schafft bzw. Neue Potentiale sucht und ausnutzt, war mir immer unter den Namen Innovation, Wachstumsstrategie oder First Mover Advantage bekannt, wenn das nun Blue Ocean Strategy heißen soll, naja.

Die Fallbeispiele: Hier werden in meinen Augen anhand isolierter Einzelbeispiele Verallgemeinerungen angestellt. Außerdem ist immer möglich anhand irgendwelcher Praxisfälle, die man IM NACHHINEIN betrachtet, eine Management Theorie bestätigt zu sehen. Es gibt unzählige Beispiele von Firmen, die anhand einer Red Ocean Strategy sehr erfolgreich waren und sind. Beispiel: Wal Mart, ein Unternehmen welches bei weitem nicht der erste Einzelhändler in den USA war, mittlerweile aber eines der größten und am höchsten bewerteten Unternehmen der Welt ist. Genauso wenig war der IPOD der erste MP3 Player. Im Gegenteil, auch hier fuhr man eine Red Ocean Strategy und dies wie jeder weiß mit enormem Erfolg. Außerdem könnte man fragen, ob es nicht auch Beispiele gibt, in denen Firmen scheiterten obwohl sie dem Blue Ocean Strategy Konzept folgten. Ich denke da z.B. an viele Dot-Com Firmen vor 10 Jahren. Die waren eigentlich so ziemlich alle im Blue Ocean, viele scheiterten aber trotzdem.

Mein Fazit: Kritisch lessen und eigene Meinung bilden. Insbesondere solle man fragen, ob hier tatsächlich konzeptionell etwas Neues entwickelt wurde.

The authors have published many articles over the last decade on Value Innovation. This is their first book. It summarizes their extensive knowledge on out-of-the-box strategic thinking. This review is based on an advance reader's copy.

What is a BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY? The authors explain it by comparing it to a red ocean strategy (traditional strategic thinking):
1. DO NOT compete in existing market space. INSTEAD you should create uncontested market space.
2. DO NOT beat the competition. INSTEAD you should make the competition irrelevant.
3. DO NOT exploit existing demand. INSTEAD you should create and capture new demand.
4. DO NOT make the value/cost trade-off. INSTEAD you should break the value/cost trade-off.
5. DO NOT align the whole system of a company's activities with its strategic choice of differentiation or low cost. INSTEAD you should align the whole system of a company's activities in pursuit of both differentiation and low cost.

A red ocean strategy is based on traditional strategic thinking - e.g. Harvard's strategy guru Michael Porter - and is what the authors believe you should not do.

A blue ocean is created in the region where a company's actions favourably affect both its cost structure and it value proposition to buyers. Cost savings are made from eliminating and reducing the factors an industry competes on. Buyer value is lifted by raising and creating elements the industry has never offered. Over time, costs are reduced further as scale economies kick in, due to the high sales volumes that superior value generates.

There are two ways to create blue oceans. In a few cases, firms can give rise to completely new industries, as eBay did with the online auction industry. But in most cases, a blue ocean is created from within a red ocean when a company alters the boundaries of an existing industry.

The authors have studied more than 150 blue ocean creations in over 30 industries. Examples include:
- Japanese fuel-efficient autos (mid-70s) and Chrysler minivan (1984)
- Apple personal computer (1978) and Dell's built-to-order computers (mid-1990s).

The INSEAD professors Kim and Mauborgne have written regularly on the subject of Value Innovation since 1997 in Harvard Business Review. Being a business development manager, their thought leadership on strategic innovation has inspired me tremendously over the years. Their articles have been standard texts for many MBA students for some time (e.g. "Value Innovation", "Creating New Market Space", "Charting your Company's Future"). I expect their first book to be just as dominant in any strategy library as Michael Porter's books (the guru behind the classic red ocean strategies).

Peter Leerskov,
Diplomkaufmann internationaler Marketing u. Management sowie Diplomkaufmann Schwerpunkt E-business

The authors looked at the business launches of 108 companies, and found that those which emphasized serving competitively uncontested customer needs were only 14 percent of the cases. Yet those "blue ocean" launches accounted for 61 percent of the total profits (or almost 10 times as many profits on average per launch as those who went after "red oceans," where competitive space is already served).

Rather than examining the processes that companies used to create these wins, the authors investigated the common strategic elements of the "blue ocean" cases they found, and developed a strategic planning process designed to focus on those elements. In the last 15 years, they have experimented with that process with a number of consulting clients and now report the results of their latest refined process.

They propose four principles formulate a strategy:

1. Reconstruct market boundaries
2. Focus on the big picture, not the numbers
3. Reach beyond existing demand
4. Get the strategic sequence right.

They also propose two principles to implement strategy:

5. Overcome key organizational hurdles
6. Build execution into strategy.

For applying each of the strategic principles, the authors describe different paths and steps, and provide simple, analytical tools designed to be applied in a back-of-the-envelope analysis.

1. Reconstruct market boundaries

Paths for this part of the process include looking across functional substitutes from other industries, different segments within an existing industry, different linked sets of buyers and buying influencers, complementary offerings, availability of functional versus emotional appeals, and extend the time perspective for a longer period. The key tool for this analysis is a simple strategy canvas that documents the areas where offerings have characteristics and whether the characteristics are positioned to be "high" or "low." Examples of this analysis abound.

2. Focus on the big picture, not the numbers

This part of the process comes in four steps:

a. Draw a strategy canvas (as described above) to see where change is needed
b. Directly observe customers and stakeholders being affected by current offerings
c. Have senior executives propose alternative strategy canvas solutions and pick a winner
d. Share the resulting strategy canvas to everyone and test it for implementation feasibility.

3. Reach beyond existing demand

You investigate specifically the needs of those who are about to stop buying in the existing industry, those who reject the existing offerings already, and noncustomers who buy now from markets distant from yours.

4. Get the strategic sequence right

You carefully check out the resulting idea in this order:

a. Does it add lots of new customer value (in terms of purchase, delivery, use, supplements, maintenance and disposal relative to customer productivity, simplicity, convenience, risk, fun and image, and environmental friendliness)?
b. Can most buyers afford the price?
c. Can you make a profit at that price?
d. Can you overcome the adoption challenges?

Blue Ocean Strategy converts into a discussion of implementation challenges from chapter 7 on, emphasizing "tipping point leadership" (refocusing attention, shifting resources from ineffective to effective areas, and gaining credibility); "fair process implementation" (involvement by employees and stakeholders rather than being treated like objects); putting up barriers to imitation; and repeating the process.

As you can see, this is a process-intensive "how to" book rather than a conceptual book, although the authors have chosen a powerful metaphor that helps offset the B-School diagrams and new terms and phrases.

The authors seem to be consciously trying to create a simpler, alternative version of Professor Michael Porter's classic, Competitive Strategy that excludes a focus on the classic simple strategies of more value, lower price or greater closeness to customers (see The Discipline of Market Leaders).

I found the book to be a close parallel to Professor Christensen's latest book for technology company innovation, Seeing What's Next, except Blue Ocean Strategy is intended to apply mostly to nontechnology companies. Both offer theories of an innovation process that they feel could work and early experiences with the process.

Both approaches remind me of the beginnings of reengineering. In fact, I renamed this book "Reengineering the Business Model" in my mind. I hope the experience with this process will be better than what followed from reengineering.

By contrast, I would like to humbly suggest that future researchers consider monitoring and examining instead the business model innovation processes of those who repeatedly introduce new business models that combine higher value, lower prices and reduced costs. I was shocked to see that such innovators were largely ignored in this book in favor of writing about cases where a single major business model innovation occurred in an organization.

If the authors had studied these examples (which have been described in the strategy literature since 1992), they would have discovered that business-model innovation of the sort they describe is more often driven by bottom-up sources and experiments rather than the top-down planning they support. As a result, I believe that their process will turn out to be relatively unproductive compared to the existing best practices in business model innovation.

As a result of that oversight, I concluded that this book will have its primary value for:

1. Entrepreneurs who are beginning to formulate a business model for a start-up and
2. Consultants who want a new service to sell to large companies who don't understand business model innovation.

I also have some quibbles with the scholarship behind the book. The key study for validating the superiority of Blue Ocean strategies isn't footnoted to a source and there is no documentation of the methodology, the sample used, the measurements or anything else that allows a reader to check out the conclusions.

Facts were frequently misstated or overstated in the beginning, once even contradicting the authors' own footnotes (saying that In Search of Excellence was published 20 years ago on page 9 while a footnote correctly states the publication date as 1982). Another example is the authors stating that the mutual fund industry was not a multibillion dollar industry in 1975 (really? -- I don't think so), nor were coffee bars a big business (the authors teach in Europe where coffee bars have been a huge business for many decades), and discount retail was not large then (ever heard of Wal-mart, Kmart, Levitz Furniture, etc.?).

For me, the best part of this book came in a few new cases that I wasn't familiar with before such as Curves (fitness salons for women), NovoLet (preloaded insulin injection pens), NABI (more durable, less costly to maintain buses), the Joint Strike Fighter (one platform customized for each branch of the U.S. military), and i-mode (Internet access on a cell phone in Japan). I thought all of the cases were well described.

If you are a serious student of strategic thinking, you should read this book. The book's content will come up in conversation, and you should have an opinion about these ideas.

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