Resource-Based View
Internal resources and capabilities as sources of sustained competitive advantage
The resource-based view (RBV) of the firm (Jay Barney; strategic management) asks why some organisations outperform rivals in the same industry: not only industry attractiveness or positioning, but idiosyncratic resources and capabilities — assets, routines, relationships, and know-how that are valuable, scarce, hard to imitate, and mobilised by structure.
RBV treats competitive advantage as inside the firm: what you hold and whether you can capture value from it. The usual teaching checklist is VRIO (Valuable, Rare, Inimitable, Organized). Grant’s knowledge-based view (KBV) extends RBV by naming knowledge as the primary strategic resource — the usual object of the VRIO test.
RBV in this corpus
RBV and dynamic capabilities are complementary: RBV asks whether current resources yield advantage; dynamic capabilities ask whether the firm can adapt when the environment moves. Operational capabilities execute today’s playbook; O in VRIO must include routines that use strategic assets daily.
This site cites RBV for strategy vocabulary — especially O and the gap between VRI assets and payoff — not as endorsement of the full empirical RBV research programme.
Corpus stance
A2 — working context: Mainstream strategy language; linked to VRIO, KBV, and harness; does not equate “inimitable resource” with any single epistemic tier.