Understanding Sustainable Competitive Advantage: The Role of Positioning, Resources and Organisational Capabilities

This paper applies the value-based framework (Brandenburger and Stuart 1994) to the strategic management concepts of positioning, resources and organisational capabilities. It observes that each is a discrete level in the analysis of sustainable competitive advantage which can rigorously be interpreted as the determinants of location and speed of movement in value space. It concludes that strategic management will never find the ultimate explanation of competitive advantage because all orders of derivatives of location in value space must be considered when predicting future strategic asymmetries. Pragmatic solutions to this dilemma for strategy formulation purposes are suggested.