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Sunday, December 24, 2017

Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne

Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne
“To search for a Blue Ocean” has become a Silicon Valley, West Coast cliché. I was resistant to read this one as a result.

But overt the summer, on the way to a fascinating course at the Singapore Insead school, I read it and learned a lot. It turns out that knowing businesses should seek less-crowded spaces in order to thrive and knowing some very practical ways to accomplish this are not the same thing at all. And this book is filled with case studies and some terrific, lightweight ways of ideating and measuring this topic.

I stole a few of the case studies here on how to graph the customer proposition relative to the competition, added a little bit of futurism borrowed from Kurzweil, and created a game I called Blue Ocean that a bunch of innovative thinkers and I used to spend some delightful hours on whiteboards. Over the last three months the result has been ten to fifteen entrepreneurial ideas which – while not all completely practical – are at least deeply innovative and have not been seen before in this world. That’s not an easy thing to do in the modern age, and I give a lot of credit to Kim and Mauborgne for clearly communicating a framework for how to think about competition and the open spaces where it may not exist.

Very useful and interesting book.

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