Blue Ocean Strategy is one of the most influential business ideas of our time. The award-winning book of the same name by Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, first published in 2005 and reprinted in 2015, has become a global phenomenon with over 3.6 million copies sold worldwide in 44 languages.

What most business leaders may not know is that Kim and Mauborgne’s theoretical framework, models and tools for creating a new marketplace were first published in the Harvard Business Review in a series of breakthrough articles that changed the way strategy and its implementation were understood. Challenging conventional wisdom, the articles questioned the concept of competition as a key element of strategy. These articles argue that direct competition leads to imitation of strategy and limits the space for profit opportunities. In order to ensure profitable growth, companies must free themselves from competition by entering a radically new market.

All of these articles served as the basis for the development of the approach that became known over time as the blue ocean strategy.

This book brings all the publications together-along with the articles that Kim and Mauborgne published in the Harvard Business Review as part of a further development of ideas related to blue ocean strategy after the first edition was published. Readers will find here the basic concepts and tools of blue ocean strategy in their original form.