Analysis of the Use of the Blue Ocean Strategy; Case Study Analysis on 14 Different Agencies
Zainal Abidin Mohamed, Graduate School of Management/ Faculty of Economics and Management Universiti Putra Malaysia E-mail: zainal@econ.upm.edu.my

ABStrAct
Fourteen companies who have applied the use of Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS) participated in this study through the case study approach. Basically, the data were focussed on the four action framework of BOS namely eliminate, reduce, raise and create activities (ERRC) identified in each of the cases. The 14 companies were grouped into 6 categories and their ERRC activities summarised accordingly. Of the 76 activities that were raised and created, 42 were customer related of which 9 were new. Of the 40 in the created category, 20 were totally new while 6 were on governance and 5 long term investment projects. Keywords: Blue Ocean Strategy, Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create Framework, Competitor Irrelevancy, Competitive Advantage,

Introduction
The Blue Ocean Strategy is still relatively new and had been introduced only in 2004 by W. C. Kim and R Mauborgne. Its principles are simple but its operationalisation and implementation has yet to be properly synchronized. Courses and workshops trained by licensed BOS are still going on and the number of certified BOS graduates has yet to be felt. Nevertheless there are already agencies that declared that they are already in the midst of applying the said BOS principles. These are the target group of this research and perhaps to increase the number of practitioners some might have to be coerced into applying the strategies proposed.

BOS Application
There are companies that admit the use of the BOS strategy and applied its principles. They were also willing to share what they have done and this paper focussed only on these three aspects of their experience: a. the kinds of analysis