Blue Oceaning Government
People familiar with Blue Ocean Strategy know some of its successful business applications.
Nintendo Wii is a well-known example. With its motion sensing controls the Wii transformed the industry, and was developed using the Blue Ocean Strategy approach.
In Australia, two publicly declared Blue Ocean Strategy business successes are Smartpen and Dingo Technologies. Both are SME’s who over the past two years have grown revenue and profits exponentially and who’s CEO’s attribute their success to Blue Ocean Strategy.
But Blue Ocean Strategy also has application at the regional and national government levels such as in the US and in Asia.
At a regional level, the Louisiana Economic Development Board (LED) adopted a Blue Ocean Strategy initiative. They approached Blue Ocean Strategy with a regional lens. Remember, this is the region which encompasses New Orleans and was dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina where it was estimated that 70,000 jobs were lost over-night.
The challenge they set for themselves was to find Blue Ocean industries that would lead to economic outperformance at a regional level and to take the State of Louisiana into those new high growth industries.
They launched their Blue Ocean Strategy in early 2009 and in May this year the US business consultancy Site Selection Group, named the Louisiana Economic Development Board the best-performing state economic development agency in the US.
At a national level, the Malaysian Government adopted Blue Ocean Strategy for its Government Transformation Programme, to lift the country from “developing” to “developed” status by 2020. It has been applied to six areas; Public Transport, Crime, Rural Infrastructure, Education, Low Income Households and Corruption.
After two years the programme has achieved 120% of its national KPIs, spending just 79% of its intended budget. On the basis of this the Government recently embarked on an initiative to educate 300,000 public servants in Blue Ocean Strategy.
(PS – We can’t resist a bit of self promotion here, because in recognition of our local Australian expertise, our Head of Advisory and Training at Blue Ocean Strategy Australia, Phillip Ng, was contracted to Malaysia in August 2011 to lead the development and launch of the government’s initial train the trainer course)
