Criticisms

While Kim and Mauborgne propose approaches to finding uncontested market space, at the present there are few success stories of companies that applied their theories in advance. One success story that does exist is Nintendo, who first applied the Blue Ocean Strategy to create the Nintendo DS handheld game system which was the first portable gaming system to offer dual screen gaming and a touch screen in 2004. In 2006, Nintendo released the Wii, which redefined how video games are played by. The 3DS is Nintendo's third endeavour for its blue ocean strategy. Its first two attempts, the Nintendo DS and Wii, were wildly successful, becoming some of the biggest selling platforms in history. Nintendo revealed their Blue Ocean Strategy during an E3 press conference during the hype build-up of the Wii.

However with just one case study, this hole in their data persists despite the publication of Value Innovation concepts since 1997. Hence, a critical question is whether this book and its related ideas are descriptive rather than prescriptive.[10] The authors present many examples of successful innovations, and then explain from their Blue Ocean perspective – essentially interpreting success through their lenses.[11]

The research process followed by the authors has been criticized[11] on several grounds. 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."[citation needed]

Brand and communication are taken for granted and do not represent a key for success. Kim and Maubourgne take the marketing of a value innovation as a given, assuming the marketing success will come as a matter of course.[10]

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.[12] The blue ocean/red ocean analogy is a powerful and memorable metaphor, which is responsible for its popularity. This metaphor can be powerful enough to stimulate people to action. However, the concepts behind the Blue Ocean Strategy (such as the competing factors, the consumer cycle, non-customers, etc.) are not new. Many of these tools are also used by Six Sigma practitioners and proposed by other management theorists.

Large fractions of the ideas and concepts of this book - how to avoid a mere one-dimensional performance/price competition and how to move on instead to deliver other (integrated, additional) values to the customer - were previously also published already in the 1993 book "sur/petition" by Edward de Bono.