Authors: Catherine Pardo
Understanding how resources are combined is a central issue and many scholars have argued that the performance of a company depends on such combinations. These combinations can either take place between resources of the same type or between resources of a different type. Combinations may be intra-organizational (within a company) and also inter-organizational (between resources belonging to different companies). In this work we are dealing with how a “focal resource” (in this case a specific piece of knowledge – which belongs to the “organizational unit” category of resources according to the 4R model (Håkansson & Waluszewski, 2002) combines with other resources (whether they are other pieces of knowledge, or products or facilities…) so as to open, at a moment in time, onto a new resource that is, eventually, combined with the customer’s resources. On the basis of a case-study that serves as a support for this work, three “combination paths” are described from the “focal resource” to the final combinations. We propose discussing this case along two concepts that are usually associated with the resource issue: 1/ the embeddedness of a resource (in a resource constellation: cf. Baraldi, Gressetvold & Harrison, 2012) at a point in time may explain the degree of difficulty for this resource to be combined with other resources: 2/ the ability of a company to identify (cf, Harrison & Håkansson, 2006) new kinds of combinations is key to these “combination paths”.
Journal: n.a. (n.a. – n.a.)
Web Address: n.a.
Publish Year: 2012
Conference: Rome, Italy (2012)