The Resource Based View (RBV) provides a relevant lens to study how firms develop competitive advantage through strategic resources and capabilities. With the growth of partnerships strategies, the RBV evolved to consider externally owned or controlled resources and capabilities, leading to the concept of relational rent. However, this evolution was limited to short-term value cocreation initiatives in dyadic or multi-firm contexts. In the age of the platform economy, the nature of value cocreation with external resources and capabilities changed fundamentally. In this context, value cocreation with an ecosystem of external resources and capabilities through platform mediated networks leads to sustained relational rents. In this context value cocreation with external resources and capabilities also becomes a fundamental way in which firms conduct their activities rather than value cocreation being limited to the scope of a particular dyadic or multi-firm alliance. This study draws considerations from the networks, ecosystems, and platforms perspectives to propose a reformulation of the RBV that considers value cocreation with external resources and capabilities in the networks context and further extends our understanding of relational rents. It is based on a longitudinal, multiple-case study that examines modalities of 20 large European banks’ strategies over 12 years. We show that interdependence emerged as a key element of value creation through relational rents and propose a model that extends the previous view on relational rent. We demonstrate how interdependence enables value creation through interplay between internal and external resources in the platform age.
The Resource-Based View (RBV) of the firm provides an explanation of how companies main gain competitive advantage on a market. When considering the use of depletive natural resources, RBV falls short in explaining how companies may both gain a maximum value from the resources and gain a sustainable competitive advantage through long term use of the resource. Confronted to a time horizon issue between short term rent appropriation and maximization and long-term availability of the resource, companies must develop strategies that enable them to secure a sustainable use of the resource. Our paper sheds light on a specific strategy that companies implement to address this issue. We called this strategy ‘pre-competition’ and theorize that it builds on a triple articulation of drawing on specific characteristics of the resource, stewardship, and articulating time horizons. In that way, we consolidate the robustness of RBV through specifying under which condition it may be applied to natural resources.
