Blue Ocean Strategy in Malaysian Public Sector: An Analysis of the Four Action Framework

Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS) is the result of 20 years of research by Kim and Mauborgne who studied over 150 strategic moves made between 1880 and 2000 in more than 100 leading companies from 30 different industries. All of these companies had successfully created new, to this point concealed markets with innovative products, services or entire new business models. Theoretically, Blue Ocean Strategy was introduced to inculcate creativity, innovation, and out-of-the-box thinking in coming up with methods to help and enhance the people's lifestyle with minimum costs. In 2010 the Malaysian government introduced the National Blue Ocean Strategy (NBOS), to reduce the cost and maximizing the output in the public sector. Reports indicated these projects gave benefits to society and government through its projects. As the National Blue Ocean Strategy has gained its momentum, their activities and impacts have been subject to closer review and evaluation. Thus, this paper embarks on analyzing the implementation of Blue Ocean Strategy in Malaysian public sector and describes blue ocean experience through Malaysia context. A conceptual framework adapted from the blue ocean book was constructed to examine the application of the four action framework in creating the value innovation in Malaysian public sector. A preliminary study has been conducted among 19 respondents of National Blue Ocean Strategy implementers. This paper reports on the pilot study on the two issues. First is to test the reliability of the questionnaire using the Cronbach's Alpha and secondly is the result from the application of the four action framework. The result agrees with the theoretical predictions and significantly proved that Malaysia National Blue Ocean Strategy has created value innovation through its application of the blue ocean way of thinking.