3 From resources to capabilities

What are resources? And what are capabilities? So far there has been some quite deliberate language used to talk about resources and hints at developing particular capabilities based on the alignment of resources. These are specific to you or your organisation, which makes it difficult for others to imitate, perhaps because they are tacit or unspoken, or even because they are something only you have access to. This could be a specific component, recipe or even location. You can think of resources as being:

• tangible – something physical that can be touched like a workshop, or a particular machine
• intangible – ‘know how’, your reputation, or work culture
• human – the people you might work with and their skills.

Critical questions in any enterprise are how you use the resources at your disposal, how you acquire the ones you need and how you configure them to make your enterprise different from others, i.e. creating strategic value, which you saw in Session 5.

One of the main things that makes enterprises different are the people in it. Therefore next you will consider human resources.