Blue Ocean refers to the uncontested market space for an unknown industry or innovation. Companies can succeed not only by battling competitors, but also by creating “Blue Ocean” of uncontested market space. Unlocking new demand and making the competition irrelevant are the results of Blue Ocean, but how to achieve it? The core idea is innovation, either products or services.
As the fast development of industry, innovation is becoming more and more important. A company without innovation can hardly survive in today’s fierce competition environment. This is especially true for high technique companies. Of course it is important to do well and bet others in Red Ocean, but enter into a blue ocean environment will absolutely boost your sales significantly and let your business continues to grow without competition for a while. There are lots of examples about the benefit of Blue Ocean. In 2007, Apple reinvented phone, which first introduced touchable smart phone. Apple got tremendous orders for this new type of phone. Later on, other companies caught up, and Blue Ocean became Red Ocean. But still, Apple enjoyed of the benefit from Blue Ocean for quite a long time. There are a few ways companies can maintain their Blue Ocean environment, be in the lead in technique and patent are the most important two. Companies always devote some money for innovation, which is usually called R&D, to help them to access to Blue Ocean opportunities.
Here is an example how a product can enter into the blue ocean market. WeChat is a mobile text and voice messaging communication service, and there are many similar applications such as What’s Up, iMessage, Facebook messenger and so on. The instance message market is almost saturation and reach out a Red Ocean status. Even WeChat did excellent job, the existence market is very stable and it is hard for WeChat to gain market share from others since they are all doing good. However, there is an alternative way for WeChat to enlarge its market, by developing a new service base on the new idea of today’s social network — weak relationship network. For the weak relationship network, we do not need to know each other in this network. Events and interests drive this network. For example, I work at Manhattan, and for lunch I have an hour to eat outside of my office. I do not want to eat with my colleagues because we talk every day. I want to find someone new and talk about traveling experience since my next vacation is coming soon. So I typed in my phone “12pm to 1pm eat at Union Square Cafe and chat about traveling”. People around me who have the same interest can response to my suggestion and we can meet then. This is a new type of social method called strangers social, and people do not need to expose too much personal information. If they have a good conversation, they can exchange contact information, otherwise, they can leave after a single event. This new type of social network can help WeChat to entering into a Blue Ocean market and gain from the new demand in this market.
Think Weekly 