Blue Ocean Strategy

The contents of the book are based on more than fifteen years of research and a series of Harvard Business Review articles as well as academic articles on various dimensions of the topic.

Kim and Mauborgne studied about one hundred fifty positions made from 1880-2000 in more than thirty industries and closely examined the relevant business players in each . They analyzed the winning business players as well as the less successful competitors. Studied industries included hotels, cinemas, retail stores, airlines, energy, computers, broadcasting, construction, automotive and steel. They searched for convergence among the more and less successful players. Divergence across the two groups was also studied to discover the common factors leading to strong growth and the key differences separating those winners from the mere survivors and the losers. Kim and Mauborgne defined a consistent and common pattern across all the seemingly idiosyncratic success stories and first called it value innovation, and then Blue Ocean Strategy.

Research results were first published in 1997 in a Harvard Business Review article by Kim and Mauborgne titled "Value Innovation: The Strategic Logic of High Growth". The ideas, tools and frameworks were tested and refined over the years in corporate practice in Europe, the United States and Asia and presented in the following eight additional articles, before being published in the form of a book in 2005.