They assert that the strategic moves outlined in the book create a leap in value for the company, its buyers, and its employees while unlocking new demand and making the competition irrelevant.

The book presents analytical frameworks and tools to foster an organization's ability to systematically create and capture "blue oceans"—unexplored new market areas.

The concept was initially developed in the 1990s when W. Chan Kim was taking part in a consulting project for Philips, headed by the management scholar C. K. Prahalad.

Instead of trying to compete with the high performance and computational power of the consoles from Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo designed the Wii's hardware to focus on innovative gameplay, incorporating the use of motion controls atypical of video games.

"[34] In addition, the book has received many positive reviews from various publications that include Chicago Tribune, Daily Herald, Credit Union Journal, Vancouver Sun, Association Meetings, Strategy & Leadership, and Business First, among many others.

[35][36][37][38][39][40][41] While Kim and Mauborgne propose approaches to finding uncontested market space, at the present there are few success stories of companies that have actively applied their theories.

[46] Criticisms include claims that no control group was used, that there is no way to know how many companies using a blue ocean strategy failed and the theory is thus unfalsifiable, that a deductive process was not followed, and that the examples in the book were selected to "tell a winning story".

[45] It is argued that rather than a theory, blue ocean strategy is an extremely successful attempt to brand a set of already existing concepts and frameworks with a highly "sticky" idea.