Since the early 1980s it has been recognized that a firm's resources, capabilities and competencies help it gain a competitive advantage, that in turn produces higher performance. This resource-based view of the firm has been an important development in the field of strategic management. It explains why some organizations perform better than others and shows that leveraging, both tangible and intangible, resources is necessary to gain a sustainable competitive advantage. Bringing together contributions from multiple perspectives this book examines the management of strategic resources. First, the book discusses resource strategy and firm performance - how resources lead to competitive advantage and how firm resources interplay with the firm strategy to produce specific outcomes. Second, it addresses the development, commitment and governance of firm resources - how firms develop critical resources, including the especially difficult development of intangible resources such as tacit knowledge, internal networks and the creation of new intellectual capital. Finally, attention is focused on the problems involved in the transfer of resources and skills in cooperative strategies such as strategic alliances, and the allocation of resources to produce innovation. The resource-based view of the firm is a valuable way of analyzing and understanding firm strategies and performance. The contributions in this book provide an important in-depth view of how strategic resources can be developed and leveraged to create value in organizations.
About the Author
About the Editors Michael A. Hitt holds the Paul M. and Rosalie Robertson Chair in Business Administration at Texas A&M University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado and has received an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in recognition of his scholarly contributions in business administration. He has authored or co-authored several books and book chapters and numerous journal articles in such journals as the Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal and Academy of Management Review. Furthermore, he has served as Consulting Editor (1988-90) and Editor (1991-1993) of the Academy of Management Journal. He is a past President of the Academy of Management and is a Fellow in that organization. Following Michael Porter (1994) and C.K. Prahalad (1995), he received the 1996 Award for Outstanding Academic Contributions to Competitiveness from the American Society for Competitiveness. Patricia Gorman Clifford is currently an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Connecticut. She has served as a Strategy Specialist for McKinsey and Company since 1996 and brings a decade of consulting and managerial experience - ranging from facilitating global mergers and acquisitions to managing a small textile mill - to her current role. Her research interests include: the generation and adoption of strategic solutions, management of inter-firm relationships and non-traditional organizational forms, and dynamics of inter-firm collaboration. Robert D. Nixon is an assistant professor of Strategic Management at the A.B. Freeman School of Business, Tulane University. He earned his engineering degree from Brigham Young University and his Ph.D. in Strategic Management from Texas A&M University. Dr. Nixon's research has been published in the Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Marketing Science Institute and Organizational Dynamics, as well as in the proceedings of national conferences. His extensive industrial experiences encompass work for international, high-technology firms and the founding and management of more than a dozen entrepreneurial firms. Kevin P. Coyne is a Director in the Atlanta office of McKinsey and Company. Over the last several years, he has led McKinsey's Strategy Theory Initiative, a large R&D project to advance the state of the art in this field. His previous articles on strategy have been published in the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Journal of Business Strategy, McKinsey Quarterly, Business Horizons, and others. In 1998, he served as the Conference Chairman for the Strategic Management Society's annual conference in Orlando, Florida. Mr. Coyne received an M.B.A. (with Distinction) from the Harvard Business School in 1978 and a Bachelor of Arts from Rice University that same year.
