The purpose of this study is to review various business strategy options and the experience of some of the companies out there who have managed to create a new market space in already declining and saturated industry. Irrespective of sizes of companies, small, medium or large, it is customary to evolve a business strategy, in order to set the future strategic position of the firm in the marketplace in terms of product and service offering, pricing and growth strategy. An organization could have an ideal strategy formulation in place, but without proper implementation mechanism it would be waste of resource and time and a pointless effort that could not produce the expected result. The research methodology employed in this study is literature review of peer reviewed articles published in quality journals. The analysis and discussion led to findings that there is always a room for incremental innovation and customer value proposition that would lead to create a new demand and market space. Moreover, there is no 'one size fit' strategy that would give winning edge for businesses, rather situational approach and combined strategy option could be the approach recommended.

The oil and gas industry with its stringent safety policies, standards, rules and procedures still experience minor-to-major operational accidents/incidents in petroleum exploration and production processes. The root causes of incidents in upstream and downstream sectors are attributed to humans and organizational factors. The sector has been revolutionizing its safety system by way of risk identification and management and hazards hunt at a workplace to reduce the risk level of fatal and non-fatal injuries. In this research, the authors apply lean philosophy to surface the challenges of oil and gas safety system in an innovative way by identifying problems at root source and addressing it with employees' engagement and involvement to continuously improve the safety system. The application of lean thinking has been proven in healthcare and manufacturing industries where this research makes parallel to take advantage of the experiences of the lean founders. Safety should not be a priority as priorities could change based on situations. Instead, safety should be an embedded business value that could be value streamed along the value chain, with value considered from the perspective of customer value that can also include the internal customer, employees. The purpose of this study is to find out why stringent oil and gas safety standards, procedures and rules have not spared the industry from occurrences of occupational accidents and incidents. Therefore, this study aims in addressing how offshore oil and gas exploration and production operational safety can be improved through lean thinking, where upstream work processes are streamlined to improve workplace visibility, eliminate wastes, improve structural sustainability as well as HSE risks and improve operational safety. The study focuses on human side of occupational safety improvement through direct employees' involvement, workforce engagement and lean thinking application using lean philosophy, practice and tools. The study comprises five parts that are: Introduction, literature review, research methodology, result, discussion and conclusion.