Harvard Business Review Leadership Library: The Executive Collection (12 Books)

CHAPTER 3

Reconstruct Market Boundaries

THE FIRST PRINCIPLE of blue ocean strategy is to reconstruct market boundaries to break from the competition and create blue oceans. This principle addresses the search risk many companies struggle with. The challenge is to successfully identify, out of the haystack of possibilities that exist, commercially compelling blue ocean opportunities. This challenge is key because managers cannot afford to be riverboat gamblers betting their strategy on intuition or on a random drawing.

In conducting our research, we sought to discover whether there were systematic patterns for reconstructing market boundaries to ...