Exam 5: The Internal Environment

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.The different forms of intellectual property protection are a first line of defence against imitation by rivals. They include patents,trademarks,and copyrights. While important,these sometimes only slow imitation.
.Reverse-engineering and other forms of "inventing around patents" are commonly used to create products and processes that are similar (but not exactly the same)to those that have been patented. Still,intellectual property protection is an important barrier to imitation.
.Competitors find it difficult to imitate processes and routines that occur "behind the scenes" of a company.
.Some processes are so complex,involving many people and tasks,that even employees of the company involved in a process would find it difficult to replicate it on their own.
.Companies are often able to keep proprietary manufacturing processes from being imitated because they are not widely observed by outsiders.
.A resource or capability that is socially complex or subject to causal ambiguity may be difficult to imitate. Consider a team-based process. It can be hard to know whether the team is successful due to the outsized influence of one member,equal contributions from all members,the physical work environment,the culture of the organization,or some combination of these. So a firm that wishes to duplicate the team's performance will have to identify all of the variables that could contribute to its success and copy them in the right proportions and combinations.