Reading Experience Economy Entrepreneurship Cases Using a Resource Based Perspective

Abstract

The resource based perspective (RBP) has provided fertile ground for theory development on the sustained competitive advantages of the firm. The question that propelled already the seminal work by Penrose (1959: "Theories of the Growth of the Firm"): what are the limiting factors to companies' growth? has proved most generative. However, Barney's articles (1991; 2001) express a need to get away from both the (external) focus on opportunities and threats (often a product-focus, as in Porter, 1980; 1985) and the (internal) focus on strengths and weaknesses (often a resource focus, as e.g. in Penrose, 1959).

The move away from the direct focus on resources as the micro-foundation for competitive advantage seems to indicate that, despite its great explanatory power, the focus on resources has its limits. We suggest to expand the RBP by including what we find to be most central in post-industrial economies, namely, organisational creativity and innovativeness, i.e., entrepreneurship as pragmatic imagination. We thus have in focus is this 'blind spot' of the RBP, the entrepreneurial capability of organisational creation, that is, what generates new resources or new resource combinations in creating new value for users/ customers. The need to understand and master this skill seems, to us, to be crucial in the experience economy, which demands from providers of products and services that they are relationally flexible when creating resource-combinations that generate affects (experiences) for the customer. An analysis of Volkswagen's luxury car project - Phaeton - will provide the empirical basis for our study.