3 flaws can be outlined in Blue Ocean Strategy

Business-landscape around the world got empowered in 2015 when Blue Ocean rose on the horizon as an enlightening business-strategy. Firms and entrepreneurs found a new way to achieve high-margin profit-growth and that too, without the market-competition. Innovations and inventive thinking became the primary assets for a business to excel.

But over a period of time, some flaws and inadequacies have been detected in the Blue Ocean strategy as well:

1. Disregard to good competition: Adopting Blue Ocean as the fulcrum of business-strategies means that you discount worthy competitors. Competition always brings the best in you and additionally, you can learn a lot from your competitors also. A simple tweak in technology, a definite change in the quality of your products or a different idea to reach to potential clients, all of this can be learnt from the competitors seamlessly. A simple learning can fetch you massive profits.
2. You are in your own world: If you are not in the market with your competitors jostling for your space, you don’t have a proper yardstick to measure the standing of your products or services. You play alone and you win. The difference of products or services from that of others is a significant scale to gauge the real performance.
3. Path fraught with risks: When you incorporate Blue Ocean, you always run a risk to go awry in search of better capabilities and competencies. You wish to renew the entire mechanism and aim for products or services which may lie beyond your capabilities. You start a journey in unchartered territories, just to avoid fellow-travellers. You may get inclined to innovations which are outside the periphery of your firm’s history, vision and employees’ strengths. New products, innovative services and new industry, all of this sounds well, but carving success at every front with all of this may not be that easy.

As a business-strategy, Blue Ocean has many positives and time and again companies have proved them by adopting it as their core vision. But strategies always have two results in success and failure and Blue Ocean is only a strategy.