E-GOST TSER Contract of the European Union HPSE-CT-2002-50026 (Thematic Network)
1st workshop : April 3rd –4th, 2003 (Strasbourg)
RESOURCES AND COMPETENCES PERSPECTIVES
ON STRATEGY OF THE FIRM:
A discussion of the central arguments
F. Amesse, A. Avadikyan, P. Cohendet
Introduction:
In 1994, Wernerfelt received an award for the best paper of the decade in Strategic Management Review (A resource-based view of the firm, 1984). Considering the fortune of the article among practicing managers (Wernerfelt, 1995), he admitted that such a fortune had been leveraged by the 1990 article of Prahalad and Hamel in Harvard Business Review (“The Core Competence of the Corporation”). Directly addressed to people in management and strategy, this article was clearly prescriptive as to the best way to set winning strategies for the firm, especially as to diversification and the abusive use of SBUs (Strategic Business Units) in highly decentralized profit centres. “In the 1990s, top executives will be judged on their ability to identify, cultivate, and exploit the core competencies that make growth possible”. Since the 1990s, the resource based view (RBV) and the core competence approach (CCA) became very attractive for many researchers and consultants. Such interest was well supported by what seemed to be a clear and superior way of setting strategies by large Japanese groups which frequently served as a benchmark case of core competence management. The strong and pervasive trends for continuous technological innovation and for technological alliances created also a rich context for the use of RBV and CCA to strategy. Analysis and theory were tempted to move from transaction costs to resources or competences or capabilities sometime in a fuzzy way in interpreting strategic moves in the context of alliances and technological changes.
