Higher growth through the Blue Ocean Strategy: Implications for economic policy

Higher growth is a key goal of companies, governments, and societies. Economic policies often attempt to attain this goal by targeting companies of certain sizes that operate in specific industries and focus on a specific business activity. This approach to policy making has considerable shortcomings and seems to be less than fully effective in increasing economic growth. We suggest a new approach to policy making that stems directly from the entrepreneurial perspective. This approach examines a successful business strategy framework – the Blue Ocean Strategy – to discover conditions for high growth. We test the propositions on empirical data for two cases of successful high-growth business, namely Slovenian gazelles and Amazon.com. The results reveal a gap between the macro level of economic policy making to achieve higher growth and the micro level of business growth. The findings call for a change in the focus of economic policies on specific size companies, industries, and business activities to intraindustry cooperation, collaboration between companies of different sizes, value innovation, and creation of uncontested markets. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.