Читать книгу Immersive Technologies to Accelerate Innovation - Simon Richir - Страница 20

The traditional approach is to face a known market in which companies compete violently for market share against each other on a roughly constant demand. This is the red ocean strategy. The ocean is red with the blood generated by this violence. It is also red with the color of the companies’ accounts. In this red ocean, decisions are made based on the competition. The advantage is that you know the market; you know it exists and you know its main characteristics. So it is a question of exploiting the existing demand, of beating the competitors, either by obtaining a better quality-price ratio or by differentiating oneself.

The blue ocean strategy described in the book Blue Ocean Strategy (Mauborgne and Kim 2007) is about moving away from an obsession with confrontation and instead seeking to create virgin markets. It is about creating trends rather than adapting to established trends. In the blue ocean, the company is not caught in competitive wars because it is the only one there. The new market does not necessarily require a technological innovation; it can be a service innovation as long as it creates value for both the company and the buyer. These innovations that create both profitability for the company and usefulness for the customer are called “useful” innovations. The blue oceans are therefore made up of all the activities in which there is not yet a competitive confrontation because they have not yet been developed, or because only one player has positioned itself there. In the blue oceans, there are many opportunities for strong and rapid growth. Logically, each blue ocean discovered by an innovative company ends up becoming a red ocean because of the arrival of competitors with an imitation strategy.

The creation of a blue ocean market should not be confused with technological innovation. Technological innovation is certainly a factor in the development of markets, but it is not necessarily the central determinant of the appearance of a new market. It is easy to find many examples of companies that have created new markets without technological innovation being the driving force:

 – Starbucks, for example, corresponds only to a new use;

 – Uber is technologically only a mobile application.

Conversely, a truly technologically innovative product may not open up a new market if it is not acceptable, useful, fun or easy to use. Google Glasses¹ were probably not a bad idea in themselves, but the technological ecosystem may not have been mature enough and there were some issues that made them unacceptable (discreet video recording, for example).

The companies that manage to go into a blue ocean are those that are successful in creating value by innovating. This value creation can come from a simplification of something that already exists, from a gain in time, productivity, pleasure, meaning, etc. In any case, technological innovation is only one way to open a market.

The blue ocean strategy should not be confused with differentiation. Differentiation consists mainly of making trade-offs on cost and service. Overall, it is about doing the same thing as a competitor, but cheaper or more high-end. Of course, when we create a low-cost equivalent of a product, we enlarge the potential customer base. However, if we have an effect on the market, we cannot say that we are really opening a new market in this case. Creating a new market is not about making a trade-off between quality and cost. It is not about being different from others, but about doing better. The limitation of this strategy is that even when a company manages to find a blue ocean, the advantage it gains is only temporary because other companies will quickly come along to take market share. In a way, the company that opened the market is the one that took all the risks, while those that follow have the ground already cleared in front of them.