What Creators and Innovators Can Learn from Blue Ocean Strategy
Assuming you have to make work that fits squarely into an existing, crowded category, competing directly with everyone else in it, is the specific trap Blue Ocean Strategy names, and it's an easy one to fall into when a category's conventions feel like fixed rules.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
0 of 3 selected
The core lessons, applied to you
Stop competing head-to-head in a crowded market
Making work that closely follows an already crowded category's conventions puts your work in direct competition with everyone else in that category, regardless of quality.
A creator makes a project that closely follows a popular category's conventions, and it gets compared directly to everything else in that category rather than valued on its own terms.
Identify one convention of your category that your current project follows closely, and ask what a genuinely different approach would look like.
Pursue differentiation and low cost at the same time
Finding a way for your work to be both genuinely distinctive and simpler to produce, rather than assuming distinctiveness requires more complexity, opens a stronger position.
A creator assumes standing out requires adding more elements and complexity, without questioning whether some conventional elements could be cut to fund something genuinely more original.
Identify one conventional element of your work you could remove entirely, and use the freed effort for something genuinely original.
Question what your industry has always competed on
Treating a category's usual conventions as fixed, rather than something you could eliminate, reduce, raise, or add to, limits how differently you could position your work.
A creator accepts a category's standard structure as the baseline, without ever asking whether all of its usual elements actually serve the work.
List your category's standard conventions, and identify one that could be eliminated entirely without the work actually missing it.
Look beyond your current customers to people you aren't serving at all
People who don't currently engage with your category at all are often where the most valuable new audience is found, more than competing for the audience already saturated with similar work.
Finishing today's project within category expectations and building toward something genuinely distinctive aren't opposites — a genuinely distinctive project often reaches the audience that matters more easily than a conventional one competing for the same crowded attention.
Name one thing, honestly
Who doesn't currently engage with your category at all, and what would reach them?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
0 of 3 selected
Run this for seven days
List your category's standard conventions, and identify one that could be eliminated entirely without the work actually missing it.