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