Exam 3: The Internal Environment: Resources, Capabilities, Core Competencies and Competitive Advantages

The three conditions that characterise difficult managerial decisions concerning resources, capabilities and core competencies are:

Value chain support activities include:

Firms create value by innovatively bundling and leveraging their resources and capabilities.

Intangible resources include:

Discuss the relationship between capabilities and core competencies.

When selecting activities to outsource, firms should select activities that:

Outsourcing is a way of adding value to a business that converts an external value-creating activity into an internal supplier.

Partnership management and operational skills are essential skills that managers need to possess in order to carry out outsourcing programs.

Describe value chain analysis.

A firm's inability to understand how a competitor uses its competencies to gain competitive advantage is an example of:

For capabilities to be a source of competitive advantage, they must allow a firm to perform value-creating activities in a manner that provides value similar to that provided by competitors.

Which of the following is a true statement about capabilities?

Increasingly customers perceive higher value in global rather than domestic brands.

Which of the following is not a factor that determines the sustainability of a competitive advantage?

A firm's reputation for its goods and services is:

Changes in the external environment cause core competencies to become core rigidities.

Once a firm has developed core competencies that can create value, it can use these core competencies as a permanent competitive advantage.

A firm can sometimes grow through making mistakes and errors.

Capabilities may be easy to imitate if they are causally ambiguous or socially complex.

From the customer's point of view, a capability can be a core competence if it is: