Companies have long engaged in head-to-head competition in search for profitable growth. Yet, recent studies show that technological advances and globalization, with subsequent leaps in industrial productivity, have allowed suppliers to produce an unprecedented array of products and services. The result is that supply increasingly exceeds demand in many industries. In this environment, competing head-on is not sufficient to sustain high performance and long-term profitable growth. To seize new profit and growth opportunities, companies must create blue oceans of new market space. The objective is not to compete head-to-head, but to make the competition irrelevant.

BOS is the result of a decade-long study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than 30 industries over 100 years (1880-2000).

BOS is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost.

The aim of BOS is not to out-perform the competition in the existing industry, but to create new market space or a blue ocean, thereby making the competition irrelevant.

While innovation has been seen as a random/experimental process where entrepreneurs and spin-offs are the primary drivers – as argued by Schumpeter and his followers – BOS offers systematic and reproducible methodologies and processes in pursuit of blue oceans by both new and existing firms.

BOS frameworks and tools include: strategy canvas, value curve, four actions framework, six paths, buyer experience cycle, buyer utility map, and blue ocean idea index.

These frameworks and tools are designed to be visual in order to not only effectively build the collective wisdom of the company but also allow for effective strategy execution through easy communication.

BOS covers both strategy formulation and strategy execution.

The three key conceptual building blocks of BOS are: value innovation, tipping point leadership, and fair process.

While competitive strategy is a structuralist theory of strategy where structure shapes strategy, BOS is a reconstructionist theory of strategy where strategy shapes structure.

As an integrated approach to strategy at the system level , BOS requires organizations to develop and align the three strategy propositions: value proposition, profit proposition and people proposition.