Managing Corporate Growth

Firm factors, industry structure and performance variation: New empirical evidence to a classic debate

“…Unlike manufacturing firms, where attention focuses on size, economies of scale, and capital requirements, among others, that are integral to the building of structural elements as sources of advantage and drivers of performance, in service industries the dominate theme seems to be focused on human capital. Here, given the people intensive nature of service firms, knowledge-related resources and other intangibles are argued to be especially important to driving performance (Swartz et al, 1992;Bharadwaj et al, 1993;Canals, 2000;Hitt et al, 2001). As predicted, the results of this study found that resources did provide a greater explanation of performance variation in service firms than in manufacturing firms, lending some evidence that resources might be a more important source of performance than industry structure.…”

“…Because services are not tangible, there is little need for capital-intensive machinery and plants or inventory requirements, and in many cases are customized for every customer, firms must produce value from an intangible 'product' or 'experience'. Service firms are, therefore, very people intensive and rely heavily on knowledge-related resources and other intangibles in order to drive performance (Swartz et al, 1992;Bharadwaj et al, 1993;Canals, 2000;Hitt et al, 2001). Thus, the source of advantage in many service firms is argued to reside in their idiosyncratic resources rather than in 'attractive' industry structures (Bharadwaj et al, 1993;Hufbauer and Warren, 1999).…”

Resources, capabilities, and the performance of industrial firms: A multivariate analysis

“…The findings are consistent with the observation of Collis and Montgomery (1998;27) that resources are 'the substance of strategy, the very essence of sustainable competitive advantage'. They, and other researchers, support the premise that intangible resources and capabilities may play a significant role in competitive advantage and value-added creation (see Canals, 2000;Chatterjee and Wernerfelt, 1991;Collis and Montgomery, 1998;Hitt et al, 2001;Itami and Roehl, 1987;Teece, 2000). The results are especially interesting because they reveal the effect of a set of intangible resources and capabilities on a set of performance measures and, thus, give added support to the resource-based insight that several resources and capabilities simultaneously affect variations in firm performance.…”

“…Intangible resources have always been considered to play an important role in firms' value creation. As pointed out by Canals (2000;118) 'as the industrial society becomes a services society, where knowledge and information are the mainstays of business growth, the importance of intangible resources will come increasingly to the forefront'. Compared with tangible resources, intangible resources such as reputation or organizational culture are less flexible (Chatterjee and Wernerfelt, 1991), hard to accumulate, and not easily transferred; they can be in multiple uses simultaneously, serve simultaneously as inputs and outputs of corporate activities (Itami and Roehl, 1987), and are not consumed when in use (Collis and Montgomery, 1998).…”

Intangible management and enterprise success in the Chinese transitional economy

“…According to this view, if such resources are unique or possess attributes superior to those of the enterprise's competitors, they become strategic assets. management systems (Chatterjee and Wernerfelt 1991, Canals 2000, Teece 2000, Hitt et al 2001, Carmeli and Tishler 2004. Organizational culture refers to the perceptions held about an enterprise and how managers attempt to rally employees around common projects, values or symbols through interactions among the various members of the organization (Dupuis 2008).…”