Review of the resource-based approach
The resource-based view (RBV) emphasizes the firm’s resources as the fundamental determinants of competitive advantage and performance. It adopts two assumptions in analyzing sources of competitive advantage ( see for instance Barney, 1991 and Peteraf and Barney, 2003). First, this model assumes that firms within an industry (or within a strategic group) may be heterogeneous with respect to the bundle of resources that they control. Second, it assumes that resource heterogeneity may persist over time because the resources used to implement firms’ strategies are not perfectly mobile across firms (i.e., some of the resources cannot be traded in factor markets and are difficult to accumulate and imitate). Resource heterogeneity (or uniqueness) is c onsidered a necessary condition for a resource bundle to contribute to a competitive advantage. The argument goes “If all firms in a market have the same stock of resources, no strategy is available to one firm that would not also be available to all other firms in the market” (C ool, Almeida Costa and Dierickx, 2002, p. 57).
Resources A good starting point to identify company resources is to look at tangible, intangible and human resources. Tangible resources are the easiest to identify and evaluate: financial resources and physical assets are identifies and valued in the firm’s financial statements. Intangible resources are largely invisible, but over time become more important to the firm than tangible assets because they can be a main source for a competitive advantage. Such intangible recourses include reputational assets (brands, image, etc.) and technological assets (proprietary technology and know-how). Human resources or human capital are the productive services human beings offer the firm in terms of their skills, knowledge, reasoning, and decision-making abilities.
strategic planning analysis
Resources are not productive on their own. The most productive tasks require that resources collaborate closely together within teams. The term organizational capabilities is used to refer to a firm’s capacity for undertaking a particular productive activity. Our interest is not in capabilities per se, but in capabilities relative to other firms. To identify the firm’s capabilities we will use the functional classification approach. A functional classification identifies organizational capabilities in relation to each of the principal functional areas.
Research strategy is a methodology that helps the researcher to investigate the research issue. According to Saunders (2003), research strategy is a general plan that helps researcher in answering the research questions in a systematic way. An effective research strategy contains the clear objectives, research questions, data collection resources and various constraints that affects the research in different ways such as access limitations, time limitations, location and money limitations, ethical issue constraints etc. An effective research strategy helps the researcher to define that why researcher employing a particular research strategy to conduct the research study in an effective manner. Research strategy is also helpful for the researcher to use specific data collection methods to support the arguments (Saunders 2003).
In an effective research strategy, researcher collects the background information and analyzes the data to reach a specific conclusion. Some important research strategy includes the analysis of literature review, case study analysis, interview, observation, experiments, survey...
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