I don't profess to be an expert on the Blue Ocean Strategy, but I can help if anybody wants to know more about it. Malstrom tends to do a good job of explaining it, but he's also very long-winded. So I figured I'd answer questions right away, tersely and to the point. I don't know how many are interested, but I figured I should offer.
I'll list the three most common questions here. Read whatever interests you, if any does.
What is a "Blue Ocean Strategy"?
Any business plan that bypasses the competition with new values is following a Blue Ocean Strategy. To have a Blue Ocean Strategy, you need to make new values that are not being targeted in an industry. There are many ways of doing this, which I'll discuss next.
What kind of Blue Ocean Strategies are there?
Though all of them rely on creating new values ("value innovation"), there's many ways to do this. For example, you can target people who don't get much focus from your market ("underserved"), as [yellow tail] wines did towards non-enthusiast wine drinkers. You can target the same groups as the market already does but with a better-suited service, as NetJets did for businesses needing cheap air travel. You can target people outside of the market entirely by making it more accessible to them, as NTT DoCoMo did with specialized internet-enabled cell phones in Japan. And many other ways exist too, inside these three general groups: customers on the fringe, current customers, and non-customers.
How does a Blue Ocean Strategy work?
Simply put, the product does something that the competitors at the time do not do. By offering something that nobody else does, a brand can be forged which gives the innovator 10 to 15 years of dominance in their new market before capable competitors eat into their new market's share. You can see this at work in the game industry all over the place: Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Grand Theft Auto, Mario, Zelda, Gran Turismo, Mario Kart, Pokemon, Halo, and many other series sell far above their competitors for their market innovations.
Ask whatever questions you have about Blue Ocean Strategies here. I'll answer them as best I can.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
