Unknown/Unmet

Written in 2004, Blue Ocean Strategy implores strategists to stop competing directly in well established markets and to shift towards market creation. The watch words for this strategy are: unknown/unmet.

But what do they mean? Does your new product, service, or point of view (POV) need to be unknown to everyone on the face of the earth? And how "unmet" are we talking about here? Where's the bar for asserting that a product, service, or POV hits the market in a way that's unknown/unmet?

Venture capital firms like Floodgate have this pretty well figured out. William Gibson wrote, "The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed." VCs try to invest in companies that are living in the kind of future that William Gibson is describing. These companies understand something about how a technology or an idea is going to change an industry, and they're making a bet that they're right about how they see these dynamics playing out.

The bet Uber made was that GPS technology would get good enough in smart phones that if you built a platform for matching riders and drivers, they'd actually be able to find each other. And they also bet that this technology would be powerful enough that it would overcome the cultural norm of: never get into a stranger's car. Turns out, they were right.

Unknown

"Unknown" in the Uber example didn't mean that nobody on the face of the earth saw these changes coming; it just meant that a small minority did. Only those who could see how ubiquitous and powerful smartphones would become could see the Uber opportunity coming.

If you're thinking about creating a new product, service, or POV and you want to know if it's "unknown" it might be easier to think about it in terms of its inverse, which is: If you pitched this idea to a random collection of ten people would they like it or hate it?

If they like it, you're in trouble because while the future is here, it's not evenly distributed. And if most people like your idea then it's probably way too similar to the way the world is today. The thing about the future is that it changes what we feel comfortable with.

Pitch the idea for Uber to someone back in the early 90s and they would have said, "No way. I'd never get into a stranger's car. You're crazy."

Unmet

"Unmet" in the Uber example was about tapping into a latent need. Anyone who was actively traveling via taxi in the early 2000s all felt the same pain, which is that it was a generally awful experience. And that's if you knew how to hail a taxi. The rest of the population was too intimidated to even try.

If you're thinking about creating a new product, service, or POV and you want to know if it's "unmet" think about it in terms of latent needs. There are a lot of things in your life you accept as "good enough" where if you were presented with an opportunity to change them, you would. So you have these needs, but you're not actively doing anything about them. Things are good enough the way they are... until something changes.

With Uber they opened an opportunity to avoid the terrible experience of getting into a cab, and in a way that was incredibly convenient. They tapped into that latent need.

Conclusion

Thinking about creating unknown/unmet products, services, and POVs becomes much easier when you take the venture capital lens of living in the future.

Use what you're seeing on the horizon to come up with assertions about how the world will change, test those assertions against today's norms and worldviews, compare your assertions against the irritations you see people and companies put up with; and that's it. You're living in the future. Do it well enough and you'll accurately predict the future in a way that gives you tremendous competitive advantage in the market.