IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ems/eureri/16037.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Blue Ocean versus Competitive Strategy: Theory and Evidence

Author

Listed:
  • Burke, A.E.
  • van Stel, A.J.
  • Thurik, A.R.

Abstract

Blue ocean strategy seeks to turn strategic management on its head by replacing ‘competitive advantage’ with ‘value innovation’ as the primary goal where firms must create consumer demand and exploit untapped markets. Empirical analysis has been focused on case study evidence and so lacks generality to resolve the debate. We provide a methodological synthesis of the theories enabling us to bring statistical evidence to the debate. Our analysis finds that blue ocean and competitive strategies overlap and managers do not face a discrete either/or decision between each strategy. Our evidence for the Dutch retail industry indicates that blue ocean strategy has prevailed as a dominant long term viable strategy.

Suggested Citation

  • Burke, A.E. & van Stel, A.J. & Thurik, A.R., 2009. "Blue Ocean versus Competitive Strategy: Theory and Evidence," ERIM Report Series Research in Management ERS-2009-030-ORG, Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
    • Handle: RePEc:ems:eureri:16037
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://repub.eur.nl/pub/16037/ERS-2009-030-ORG.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Salmon, Mark H, 1982. "Error Correction Mechanisms," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 92(367), pages 615-629, September.
    2. Niels Bosma & Gerrit Wit & Martin Carree, 2005. "Modelling Entrepreneurship: Unifying The Equilibrium and Entry/Exit Approach," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 25(1), pages 35-48, August.
    3. Demsetz, Harold, 1973. "Industry Structure, Market Rivalry, and Public Policy," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 16(1), pages 1-9, April.
    4. Thurik, A. Roy & Carree, Martin A. & van Stel, André & Audretsch, David B., 2008. "Does self-employment reduce unemployment?," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 23(6), pages 673-686, November.
    5. Jack High (ed.), 2001. "Competition," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 1751.
    6. Maurizio Zollo & Sidney G. Winter, 2002. "Deliberate Learning and the Evolution of Dynamic Capabilities," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 13(3), pages 339-351, June.
    7. Carree, Martin & Thurik, Roy, 1994. "The Dynamics of Entry, Exit and Profitability: An Error Correction Approach for the Retail Industry," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 6(2), pages 107-116, April.
    8. Kim, Changsu & Yang, Kyung Hoon & Kim, Jaekyung, 2008. "A strategy for third-party logistics systems: A case analysis using the blue ocean strategy," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 36(4), pages 522-534, August.
    9. Salmon, Mark, 1982. "Error Correction Mechanisms," Economic Research Papers 269151, University of Warwick - Department of Economics.
    10. Beesley, M E & Hamilton, R T, 1984. "Small Firms' Seedbed Role and the Concept of Turbulence," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(2), pages 217-231, December.
    11. Michael E. Porter, 2000. "Location, Competition, and Economic Development: Local Clusters in a Global Economy," Economic Development Quarterly, , vol. 14(1), pages 15-34, February.
    12. Timothy Dunne & Mark J. Roberts & Larry Samuelson, 1988. "Patterns of Firm Entry and Exit in U.S. Manufacturing Industries," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 19(4), pages 495-515, Winter.
    13. Kathleen M. Eisenhardt & Jeffrey A. Martin, 2000. "Dynamic capabilities: what are they?," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 21(10‐11), pages 1105-1121, October.
    14. Audretsch, David B. & Baumol, William J. & Burke, Andrew E., 2001. "Competition policy in dynamic markets," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 19(5), pages 613-634, April.
    15. Hun Lee & Ken G. Smith & Curtis M. Grimm & August Schomburg, 2000. "Timing, order and durability of new product advantages with imitation," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 21(1), pages 23-30, January.
    16. Albert N. Link, 2007. "Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Technological Change," Technical Reports 070716, Brandmeyer Center for Applied Economics, School of Business, University of Kansas.
    17. Sidney G. Winter, 2003. "Understanding dynamic capabilities," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(10), pages 991-995, October.
    18. Karel Cool & Lars‐Hendrik Röller & Benoit Leleux, 1999. "The relative impact of actual and potential rivalry on firm profitability in the pharmaceutical industry," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 20(1), pages 1-14, January.
    19. Janice A. Black & Kimberly B. Boal, 1994. "Strategic resources: Traits, configurations and paths to sustainable competitive advantage," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 15(S2), pages 131-148, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Papazov Emil & Mihaylova Lyudmila, 2016. "Using Key “Blue Ocean” Tools for Strategy Rethinking of a SME: A Case from the Bulgarian Knitwear Industry," Economics and Business, Sciendo, vol. 29(1), pages 104-110, August.
    2. Dag Øivind Madsen & Kåre Slåtten, 2019. "Examining the Emergence and Evolution of Blue Ocean Strategy through the Lens of Management Fashion Theory," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 8(1), pages 1-23, January.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. André van Stel & Roy Thurik & Andrew Burke, 2008. "Investigating Blue Ocean v. Competitive Strategy: A Statistical Analysis of the Retail Industry," Scales Research Reports H200801, EIM Business and Policy Research.
    2. Iman Seoudi & Matthias Huehn & Bo Carlsson, 2008. "Penrose Revisited: A Re-Appraisal of the Resource Perspective," Working Papers 14, The German University in Cairo, Faculty of Management Technology.
    3. Dennis Fok & André Stel & Andrew Burke & Roy Thurik, 2019. "How entry crowds and grows markets: the gradual disaster management view of market dynamics in the retail industry," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 283(1), pages 1111-1138, December.
    4. Kaiser, Ulrich & Grimpe, Christoph, 2008. "Gains and Pains from Contract Research: A Transaction and Firm-level Perspective," ZEW Discussion Papers 08-002, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    5. Dennis Fok & Andre van Stel & Andrew Burke & Roy Thurik, 2010. "Industry Dynamics and Entrepreneurship: An Equilibrium Model," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 10-012/3, Tinbergen Institute, revised 08 Oct 2010.
    6. Gligor, David M. & Holcomb, Mary C. & Feizabadi, Javad, 2016. "An exploration of the strategic antecedents of firm supply chain agility: The role of a firm's orientations," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 179(C), pages 24-34.
    7. Wójcik Piotr, 2015. "Exploring Links Between Dynamic Capabilities Perspective and Resource-Based View: A Literature Overview," International Journal of Management and Economics, Warsaw School of Economics, Collegium of World Economy, vol. 45(1), pages 83-107, March.
    8. Tarifa Fernández, Jorge & de Burgos Jiménez, Jerónimo & Céspedes Lorente, José Joaquín, 2018. "Absorptive capacity as a confounder of the process of supply chain integration," MPRA Paper 120125, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 2018.
    9. Giada Baldessarelli & Nathalie Lazaric & Michele Pezzoni, 2022. "Organizational routines: Evolution in the research landscape of two core communities," Post-Print halshs-03718851, HAL.
    10. Tobias Knabke & Sebastian Olbrich, 2018. "Building novel capabilities to enable business intelligence agility: results from a quantitative study," Information Systems and e-Business Management, Springer, vol. 16(3), pages 493-546, August.
    11. Pandza, Krsto & Ellwood, Paul, 2013. "Strategic and ethical foundations for responsible innovation," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 42(5), pages 1112-1125.
    12. Jim Andersén, 2023. "Green resource orchestration: A critical appraisal of the use of resource orchestration in environmental management research, and a research agenda for future study," Business Strategy and the Environment, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(8), pages 5506-5520, December.
    13. Hazhir Rahmandad & Nelson Repenning, 2016. "Capability erosion dynamics," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(4), pages 649-672, April.
    14. Emanuela Todeva & Ruslan Rakhmatullin, 2016. "Industry Global Value Chains, Connectivity and Regional Smart Specialisation in Europe. An Overview of Theoretical Approaches and Mapping Methodologies," JRC Research Reports JRC102801, Joint Research Centre.
    15. von den Driesch, Till & Eva Susanne da Costa, Maika & Christina Flatten, Tessa & Brettel, Malte, 2015. "How CEO experience, personality, and network affect firms' dynamic capabilities," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 33(4), pages 245-256.
    16. Quan Anh Nguyen & Gillian Sullivan Mort, 0. "Conceptualising organisational-level and microfoundational capabilities: an integrated view of born-globals’ internationalisation," International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, Springer, vol. 0, pages 1-23.
    17. Ortiz García Navas, Beatriz & Donate Manzanares, Mario Javier & Guadamillas Gómez, Fátima, 2019. "Social capital as a theoretical approach in Strategic Management," Cuadernos de Gestión, Universidad del País Vasco - Instituto de Economía Aplicada a la Empresa (IEAE).
    18. Dario Blanco-Fernandez & Stephan Leitner & Alexandra Rausch, 2022. "Interactions between the individual and the group level in organizations: The case of learning and autonomous group adaptation," Papers 2203.09162, arXiv.org.
    19. Jasna Prester, 2023. "Operating and Dynamic Capabilities and Their Impact on Operating and Business Performance," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(20), pages 1-24, October.
    20. Anja Schulze & Stefano Brusoni, 2022. "How dynamic capabilities change ordinary capabilities: Reconnecting attention control and problem‐solving," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 43(12), pages 2447-2477, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    blue ocean strategy; competitive advantage; entrepreneurial discovery; innovation; retailing;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L26 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Entrepreneurship
    • M - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics
    • M13 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - New Firms; Startups
    • M21 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Economics - - - Business Economics
    • O32 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Management of Technological Innovation and R&D

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ems:eureri:16037. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: RePub (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/erimanl.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.