Synergies and Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Synergy is a concept fraught with ambiguity about its sources and effects, perhaps as a consequence of of previous literature on the subject not distinguishing between these. In this paper, the sources of synergy are separated from the sources of sustainable competitive advantage in order to analyze the competitive implications of different types of synergies, and thus be able to answer the question of when and under which circumstances synergy can be expected to generate sustainable competitive advantage.