ASSIGNMENT COVER

Course code: MBA 555

Course name: Business Strategy

Assignment title: Discussion Question 6

Instructor’s name: Pantelis Voniatis

Student’s name: George Panagiotopoulos

Date: 22/11/2014

Comments:

Grade: /100

DQ6 – Briefly discuss and explain what exactly is Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS)?
 According to George, A. and Bennett, A. (2005) blue ocean strategy is a systematic

approach to break out of the red ocean of bloody competition and make the competition

irrelevant by reconstructing market boundaries to create a leap in value for both the company

and its buyers. Instead of competing in existing industries (George, A. and Bennett, A. 2005).

Blue ocean strategy equips companies with frameworks and analytic tools to create their own

blue ocean of uncontested market space. During the past decades some famous strategy

frameworks for the creation of new business models have been introduced.

Next to the well-known publications of Porter (1991) a rather new model called Blue

Ocean Strategy (BOS) framework by Kim and Mauborgne (2004) as stated “has now won

rapidly worldwide publicity , recognition and acceptance”.( Kim & Mauborgne 2004). Until

now, no scientific validation of the Blue Ocean Strategy has been done yet. The Blue Ocean

Strategy as a method for developing sustainable profitable frameworks implies the

fundamental idea of developing new innovational markets with a majority of new customers.

The Blue Ocean Strategy seems to be a perfect solution for most companies to appear

sustainable and successful. According to Kim and Mauborgne the main benefits can be seen in

Figure 1.
 Blue ocean strategy is about risk minimization as there is nothing as a riskless strategy. It

has accomplished six main principles. The first blue ocean principle – is to reconstruct market

boundaries \and search the risk of how to successfully identify any possibilities that might

exist, commercially with blue ocean opportunities .The second principle delivers only tactical

red ocean moves by tackling the risk of investing lots of effort and time. The third principle

deals with the high risk of aggregating the greatest demand for a new offering. The fourth

principle is a strategy focused on building a robust business model to ensure that you make a

healthy profit on your blue ocean idea. The fifth principle suggests how to overcome

organizational obstacles in organizational risk. The sixth principle is to implement and execute

a strong strategy and motivate people to implement and enforce the blue ocean strategy always

overcoming management risk.

R E F E R E N C E S:

1) George, A. and Bennett, A. (2005); “Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social

Sciences”; MIT Press, 2005 -331 pages

2) Kim, W. C. and Mauborgne, R. (2004); “Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested

Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant“; Harvard business review; October

2004; p71 -81

3) Porter, M. E. (1991); “Towards a dynamic theory of strategy”; Strategic Management

Journal Special Issue: Special Issue; Volume 12, Issue S2, pages 95–117