Advances in Applied Business Strategy

Identifying exactly which specific resources will be strategically valuable in the future remains a deep theoretical conundrum within the current resource-based view in strategy. The competence perspective, however, has suggested at least a partial way out of this theoretical impasse in the resource-based view by arguing that the strategic value of resources (now or in the future) is determined by the way those resources are systemically interrelated and used with other resources in value creation processes. In effect, to understand which resources have or will have strategic value, it is necessary to analyze the open system of resource flows that sustain a value creation process and the role that specific resources play in sustaining value creation processes in that system. In their paper “The valuation of resources: Looking through the eyes of the customer,” Sicco Santema and Jeroen van de Rijt outline an approach to valuing specific kinds of resources by examining their role in the overall value-creation processes of an industry. By analyzing the ways in which the resources within a firm impact the value-creation processes of other firms that are its suppliers and customers, the authors provide a framework for resource valuation in which market processes and the importance and scarcity of specific resources within those processes are the ultimate determinants of the value of a resource.