The Ocean Has Changed. Here's What I Think Comes Next.

I've been sitting on this idea for a while.

Not because I wasn't sure about it. But because I wanted to be honest about what I was actually claiming — and whether it was worth claiming at all.

There are already two dominant metaphors in business strategy. Both are brilliant. Both have shaped how an entire generation of founders and executives think about competition and markets. I didn't want to add a third just for the sake of it.

But I kept running into the same wall.

Every time I sat down with a founder — whether in Bengaluru, in Dubai, or on a call from Melbourne — and tried to apply either framework cleanly to what they were facing, something didn't quite fit. The world they were operating in didn't behave like either ocean.

It moved too fast to be Blue. It was too ambiguous to be Red. And the strategies that were actually working for the best operators I knew weren't about fighting for position or creating uncontested space.

They were about reading the current — and moving before anyone else saw it forming.

That's what this essay is about.

Red Ocean Strategy — the idea that most businesses compete in defined, crowded markets where the primary moves are cost reduction, differentiation, and outperforming rivals — is still the most accurate description of how most companies actually operate. It's not glamorous. But it's honest. The majority of business life happens in Red water.

Blue Ocean Strategy — introduced by Kim and Mauborgne in 2005 — was genuinely transformative. The insight that you could create uncontested market space by reaching non-customers with new value, rather than fighting over existing demand, changed how the smartest strategists thought about growth. Cirque du Soleil. Southwest Airlines. Nintendo Wii. The examples were compelling. The framework was clean.

But here's the thing about 2005: a company that created a Blue Ocean could hold it for years. The competitive intelligence cycle was slow. Imitation required capital, talent, time, and distribution that took years to assemble.

That world no longer exists.

I'm not being dramatic. I'm being precise. AI has compressed the interval between Blue Ocean creation and Red Ocean invasion from years to months. Sometimes weeks. A genuinely differentiated product can now be analysed, reverse-engineered, and deployed in a credible competitive version before the original company has consolidated its advantage.

This is not a small change. It is a structural shift in the physics of competition.

And it means that a strategy built around creating uncontested space — without a framework for what happens when that space begins to fill — is now incomplete at best, and dangerous at worst.

Before I get to what I'm proposing, I want to name something that already exists — because it's real, it has value, and it belongs in the landscape.

Grey Ocean Strategy.

The term was coined by the academic strategist Fréry in 2014. The idea is straightforward: some markets are so unglamorous, so regulatory-heavy, so reputationally unattractive that most competitors simply won't enter them. Companies that deliberately operate in these spaces find surprising durability — not because they're better, but because no one else wants to be there.

Think: healthcare compliance software. Rural logistics. Government contract work. Waste management technology. Businesses that require you to spend years developing regulatory expertise, sacrifice margin to meet standards, or operate in sectors that don't appear in glossy startup decks.

Grey Ocean is a real strategic position. I know operators who've built substantial, durable businesses in it. The deterrence is the moat.

But it is ultimately defensive. You are not flowing into opportunity. You are hiding from competition. And in a world where AI-powered competitive analysis can identify underserved regulatory niches faster than a human strategy team, even deterrence-based advantages erode faster than before.

So we have four oceans in the landscape now. Red, Blue, Grey — and the one I want to introduce.

Water has no fixed shape. It takes the form of its container. It finds every gap, fills every void, and is simultaneously the most adaptive and the most powerful force on earth.

It can be a gentle current. A devastating surge. A crystalline structure. Or vapour — invisible, evaporated, repositioned before anyone noticed it had gone.

Liquid Ocean Strategy is my framework for competing in markets that are in constant phase transition — driven by the simultaneous convergence of three forces that define our current era:

The AI Current. AI is not a feature or a product category. It is the medium through which strategy now moves. It compresses the gap between insight and execution. It turns human judgment into either a compounding asset or a compounding liability — depending entirely on how deliberately you engage with it. The strategist who treats AI as infrastructure rather than a bolt-on capability operates at a fundamentally different velocity than one who doesn't.

The Green Current. Sustainability has passed its inflection point. I've watched this shift happen in real time across the markets I work in — India, Australia, the Middle East. ESG mandates and climate capital are not constraints on strategy anymore. They are generators of entirely new demand pools. The Green Current is creating some of the largest new markets of the next decade. The companies that build with it compound. The ones that treat it as compliance friction get left behind.

The DeepTech Current. Biotech. Quantum computing. Advanced materials. Synthetic biology. These are not improvements to existing markets. They are category-dissolvers — technologies that don't compete inside industries, they rebuild industries at the foundation. DeepTech is the phase-changer. The force that turns an entire sector's assumptions to liquid before most incumbents notice the temperature has changed.

When all three currents converge, you get what I call a Liquid Market — a space of extraordinary opportunity and zero permanence. No fixed boundaries. No durable moats. Only flow advantage.

This is where I want to be concrete, because frameworks without operational discipline are just metaphors.

A Liquid Ocean strategist operates across four states — the same way water moves through four physical states. Knowing which state you're in, and which one is coming next, is the entire game.

Flow. Constant, low-cost sensing. Reading weak signals — regulatory shifts, emerging technologies, behaviour changes in adjacent markets — before they become obvious to the crowd. AI-augmented intuition earns its value here. In Flow state, you are not committing resources. You are watching the water move, learning its direction, staying light enough to change course.

I've seen founders skip this state entirely — moving straight from idea to execution without ever genuinely sensing whether the current was with them or against them. The ones who do it well look almost lazy from the outside. They're not. They're reading.

Surge. When a Liquid Market begins to take shape — when the signals converge, when the regulatory window opens, when the technology becomes deployable at scale — concentrated action beats broad coverage. Every time. Surge is not recklessness. It is the disciplined deployment of your differentiation at exactly the right moment. The window is short. The return for moving first is disproportionate.

The mistake I see here is hedging. Companies that spent six months in Flow and correctly identified the moment — then spread their resources across three adjacent bets instead of concentrating on the clearest one. Liquidity requires commitment at the moment of surge.

Crystallise. In a Liquid Market, permanent moats are a myth. Let go of the idea. What you can build is a timed moat — a crystallised advantage that gives you 18 to 36 months of compounding before the market liquefies again. Network effects. Proprietary data. Regulatory positioning. Customer switching costs. Build it knowing you will rebuild it. That is not weakness. That is Liquid thinking.

The companies that understand this are already planning their next Surge while they're Crystallising the current one. Two horizons, held simultaneously.

Evaporate. The most underrated strategic skill of the AI era. Evaporate is the conscious exit from a position before it turns competitive and commoditised — before the Red Ocean forms around you. It preserves capital, reputation, and optionality for the next Surge cycle.

This is the hardest state. It requires you to leave something that is still working. The attachment to a position you built — the identity investment in a product, a market, a way of operating — is where Liquid strategists most often go wrong. I've seen it in founders. I've felt it myself.

The question is not "is this still working?" The question is "how long before it stops?"

These are not hypotheses. They're conclusions I've reached through watching what actually works — across HealthTech, PropTech, GCC transformation, and the India startup ecosystem over the past several years.

No market is permanent. Only your ability to read its next state. The Blue Ocean you created last year is filling with competitors today. That is not failure — it is physics.

AI is the water, not the boat. It is not a tool you pick up for a specific task and put back down. It is the medium your strategy moves through. Every signal, every decision loop, every execution cycle runs through it — or it should.

Green is the new current. I'm particularly bullish on this in the India context. The convergence of climate capital, government mandate, and genuine entrepreneurial energy around Green markets here is unlike anything I've seen in my 25 years building products. The founders who are building Green into their core thesis — not as a feature or a filter, but as a strategic current — are going to look prescient in five years.

DeepTech changes what markets are. Not what exists within them. What they are. The companies that invest in DeepTech literacy now — not building it necessarily, but understanding it well enough to know when it will transform their category — will have a navigational advantage that is very hard to replicate.

Flow beats force. The best strategy is not the hardest push. It is the smartest path — the one that finds the gap, moves through it with precision, and does not exhaust itself fighting the current. I keep coming back to this. The founders I've watched build the most durable things in the most turbulent markets almost never looked like they were straining. They looked like they were reading.

I want to be honest about the genesis of Liquid Ocean Strategy, because intellectual honesty matters to me more than intellectual property.

The Red/Blue Ocean framing is Kim and Mauborgne's. The Grey Ocean concept is Fréry's. I am building on their work — consciously and with respect for what they contributed.

What I'm adding is a framework specifically built for the convergence moment we are in right now. The AI + Green + DeepTech inflection. The compression of competitive timelines. The new physics of market creation and erosion.

I've been developing this through my work at Studio NAVAKA — with founders navigating AI-native product strategy, with GCC leaders managing transformation mandates, with scale-up CEOs whose Blue Ocean advantages are beginning to attract imitators. The framework emerged from practice, not from a whiteboard.

It will keep evolving. I expect to be wrong about parts of it. That's also Liquid thinking — building knowing you will rebuild.

"Am I building for the market as it is — or for the market as it is becoming?"

If the honest answer is the former, I know I'm operating in the wrong ocean.

I've started asking this in every strategy session I run. The discomfort it produces is usually proportional to how urgently the answer matters.

More about the framework at https://www.studionavaka.com/liquid-ocean

If this framing resonates with how you're seeing your market right now, I'd genuinely value your response. What's working in your context? Where does the framework break? Where does it fit better than you expected?

This is a living document. Your thinking makes it sharper.

— Hari

Harinath Pudipeddi is the Founding Principal of Studio NAVAKA — a product strategy and portfolio architecture firm. He writes at TheStrategyMonk and works with a small number of founders and executive teams at a time.

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