A Walkthrough of the Blue Ocean Strategy Skill: Creating Uncontested Market Space
Six commands that apply Kim and Mauborgne's strategy framework — mapping your competitive landscape, applying the Four Actions Framework, and designing value innovation.
W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy distinguishes between red oceans (existing market spaces with defined competitors) and blue oceans (new, uncontested market spaces). The framework shows how companies can create blue oceans rather than competing in red ones — making competition irrelevant by offering fundamentally different value.
The Blue Ocean Strategy BookSkill has six commands. Here's what each does.
The Six Commands
/strategy-canvas — Map Your Competitive Landscape
What it does: Builds the Strategy Canvas — Blue Ocean Strategy's core diagnostic tool. You identify the key competitive factors in your industry, score your company's current offering on each factor, and score your major competitors. The resulting picture shows where you're competing on the same factors as everyone else and where differentiation might be possible.
What you get: A strategy canvas diagram — a visual map of your current competitive position relative to alternatives.
When to use it: First. The strategy canvas reveals whether your current strategy is differentiated or if you're competing in the same space as your competitors on the same factors.
/four-actions — Apply Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create
What it does: The Four Actions Framework is the primary tool for creating blue oceans: Eliminate factors the industry takes for granted that have little value, Reduce factors well below industry standard, Raise factors well above industry standard, Create factors the industry has never offered. The command walks you through all four categories for your specific offering.
What you get: A Four Actions Framework analysis — a specific set of changes to your offering that would create a new value curve and differentiate you from the industry standard.
When to use it: After the strategy canvas reveals where you're competing head-on. The four actions framework generates the specific changes that would create differentiation.
/non-customer-analysis — Look Where Others Don't
What it does: Kim and Mauborgne identify three tiers of non-customers: people on the edge of your market who use your product minimally, people who have chosen against your category, and people far from your market who have never considered your category. Understanding why each tier doesn't use your product reveals unserved needs that could define a blue ocean.
What you get: A non-customer opportunity map — the specific reasons each tier of non-customers isn't engaging with your category, and the needs those reasons point to.
When to use it: When looking for growth opportunities beyond your current market. Non-customers often reveal the most important unmet needs because they represent demand that hasn't been captured.
/value-innovation — Design the New Value Proposition
What it does: Value innovation — simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost — is the cornerstone of Blue Ocean Strategy. This command helps you design a value innovation for your offering: something that creates buyer value through elimination and reduction of some factors while raising others that matter most.
What you get: A value innovation proposition — a specific redesign of your offering that creates more value for buyers while reducing or eliminating the costly factors they don't value.
When to use it: After the four actions framework and non-customer analysis have revealed where new value can be created.
/blue-ocean-idea — Generate New Opportunities
What it does: Applies Kim and Mauborgne's Six Paths Framework to systematically generate blue ocean ideas: look across substitute industries, strategic groups within your industry, the chain of buyers, complementary offerings, functional/emotional orientation, and time. Each path opens a different angle on potential new market space.
What you get: A blue ocean opportunity list — specific market space ideas generated through systematic application of all six paths.
When to use it: When you want to generate options before committing to a specific direction. The six paths framework often produces surprising directions that weren't visible when looking only at your current competitive space.
/buyer-utility — Map the Full Buyer Experience
What it does: The Buyer Utility Map examines the full experience of a buyer across six stages (purchase, delivery, use, supplements, maintenance, disposal) and six utility levers (productivity, simplicity, convenience, risk, fun/image, environmental friendliness). Most businesses optimize a few cells in this map while ignoring the rest — the unexploited cells represent blue ocean opportunities.
What you get: A buyer utility analysis — the full map of your buyer experience with specific opportunities in the underserved cells.
When to use it: When looking for product or service improvements that would create meaningful differentiation.
Recommended Sequence
/strategy-canvas— understand your current competitive position/four-actions— identify what to eliminate, reduce, raise, create/non-customer-analysis— find unserved demand/blue-ocean-idea— generate new directions/value-innovation— design the new proposition/buyer-utility— map the full buyer experience for improvements
What Blue Ocean Strategy Delivers
The Blue Ocean framework's most important contribution is the explicit acknowledgment that competing harder in an existing market is often the wrong strategy. The goal isn't to beat your competitors — it's to make your competitors irrelevant by offering something so different that comparison becomes difficult.
The Skill makes this strategic aspiration concrete: the strategy canvas shows where you're competing in a red ocean, the four actions framework generates the specific changes, and the non-customer analysis reveals the unmet needs that could define a new space.
Ready to find your blue ocean? Get the Blue Ocean Strategy BookSkill and start with /strategy-canvas.