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

From a customer's point of view, for an organization's capability to be a core competence it must be:

A local restaurant, Farm Fresh Ingredients, has become highly successful through its menu, based solely on organically raised chicken and beef, and organic seasonal produce. It has opened new locations in other cities, and these new locations are becoming highly profitable. Farm Fresh can expect that, at best, its competitive advantage will be:

All core competencies have the potential to become core: 

Define outsourcing.  Why do organizations outsource?

All of the following were traditional sources of competitive advantage EXCEPT:

______ can be viewed as the capacity to take action.

To build social capital whereby resources such as knowledge are transferred across organizations requires ______ between the parties.

The value of tangible assets, such as the firm's borrowing capacity and its physical plant, is high because these assets can be easily leveraged to derive additional value.

To provide a sustainable competitive advantage, a capability must satisfy all of the following criteria EXCEPT:

Value chain analysis is a tool used to:

A major reason outsourcing is effective is that:

Capabilities may be costly to imitate if firms have unique and valuable organizational cultures, are causally ambiguous, and socially complex.

One reason executive judgment can be a particularly important source of competitive advantage is that judgment:

Firms should seek to continually develop new core competencies because all core competencies guarantee above-average profit.

ACME Corp. is a leading provider of radios to the commercial market. Its products all rely on printed circuit-board technology. ACME has protected its market leadership with continued advancements in this technology, which it patents. A competitor has developed a radio for this market with equal performance but uses a software-based technology instead of circuit boards. ACME's technology leadership fails which capability test?

Government agencies are known for having so many layers and rules that decisions are made slowly and inefficiently.  In this case the ______ resource is a detriment to taxpayers using and paying for the bureaucracy.

Describe the four specific criteria that managers can use to decide which of their firm's capabilities have the potential to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Which of the following is NOT a component of internal analysis leading to competitive advantage?

The most numerous of the following organizational characteristics are:

Tangible resources include: