companies such as SaeHan
companies such as SaeHan and Diamond Multimedia (Shih, 2009). The second is that almost any differentiated product can be cast ex-post as a Blue Ocean strategy. A case in point is the YellowTail wine. While Kim and Mauborgne go to great length in describing how YellowTail’s is truly a Blue Ocean strategy, the reality is that for the average consumer, YellowTail is just another bottle of wine with a nice yellow label on a shelf, and the case can certainly be made that it does not amount to more than a smart marketing strategy: how blue really is Yellow- Tail?
The third question is that carrying the real Blue Ocean strategy is not without risk. The history of innovation is full of ambitious, ground breaking projects aimed at creating whole new markets, with names such as Iridium, the satellite mobile phone system launched by Motorola coming to mind. Iridium was a $5 billion ambitious, Blue Ocean mobile phone network relying on 66 satellites. Launched amid phenomenal public and industry interest in 1998, it filed for Chapter 11 less than a year later (MacCormack and Herman, 2001).
Following Golder and Tellis (1993), Markides and Geroski (2005) question the very relevance of the first-mover advantage. They studied around fifteen markets, in very different industries, and came up with the conclusion that whatever the industry, the first company to discover a new market (the pioneer) was surpassed by a bigger and smarter competitor (the colonisator). Examples given by Markides and Geroski include Ampex, which pioneered the VCR industry, yet was quickly surpassed by JVC and Sony and became a marginal player, Triumph and Harley- Davidson, which pioneered the motorcycle industry, but were taken over by Japanese players such as Honda, and Compuserve, which pioneered electronic messaging services, but was surpassed by AOL. These results are confirmed by the recent study by Min et al. (2006) of 264 new industrial products. In studying various patterns of innovation strategy, Miller and Olleros (2007) also show that in some cases, late entrants can gain substantially if they have the required capa- bilities and the financial resources. Based on their research, and consistent with academic research, Markides and Geroski (2005) consider that the right strategy for the incumbent firm is to be a “Fast Second”, i.e., to let other firms enter first, when the market is not yet growing, and to enter quickly thereafter.
Examples of pioneers ceding to Fast Second followers are indeed numerous. Does that mean that the right innovation strategy is to position a firm as a fast follower? Unfortunately, it is not that simple, as the Fast Second theory is not without its limitations. Firstly, because several market leaders were indeed first movers, and have not been displaced by fast second players. For instance, Nespresso, which undertook the development of its Nespresso home espresso coffee machine as far back as 1974 and took a good 15 years to bring it to market (Miller and Kashani, 2003), is still the market leader. Southwest Airlines, which
364 B. Buisson & P. Silberzahn
