Managing Dynamic Capabilities in Alliance Portfolios

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: The field of strategic management deals with understanding the ways how firms achieve competitive advantage and how they create superior value. Knowledge creation is carried out by explaining phenomena that can be observed in business life and by applying and developing theories and their implications. Often, new perspectives emerge through criticism of existing models. A similar process was necessary to discover the potential of the resource-based view, which had taken almost 30 years from its first systematisation to an increasing amount of literature dealing on the topic. The resource-based view nowadays reflects one of the most important perspectives on strategic management. Basically, the resource-based view is a platform for many research streams, underlying the same basic assumptions, that presently are creating new knowledge, a better understanding and will continue to do so in the future. In fact, the resource-based view is a result from the critics of the industry structure view and has gained its popularity from the potential which it has proven by sourcing several research ideas. Initially, the resource-based view was seen as the opposite of the industry structure view, which is externally oriented whereas the resource-based view focuses on firm’s internal processes to achieve competitive advantage. From today’s point of view, an integrated ansatz is traced. Every different perspective relies on a certain number of similar assumptions with another perspective. Often, it seems possible to explain business phenomena by integrating theories into a consistent view. This approach has had potential for highly-influential strategic management theories and it has still for future research. Especially, the transaction cost theory provides valuable extensions and explanations for observations within the resource-based view. The same statement is valid for the integration of the resource-based view and the industry structure view. In fact, Prof. Barney who established the most cited basis for the resource-based view in 1991 considered varying embodiments for the resource-based view since the perspective is highly related to micro-economics, evolutionary economics and the industry structure view. With respect to the foundation of the resource-based theory, many other perspectives emerged, such as the competence-based view, the routine-based view, the capability-based view, the dynamic capability perspective, the [...]

Felix Arndt, Dipl-Ing., Studium des Wirtschaftsingenieurwesens in Berlin, Stanford und Trondheim. Seit einigen Jahren tätig als Unternehmensberater im In- und Ausland.