4 Sustainability and making a difference

How will you be able to sustain any competitive advantage you create? So far in this session you have mainly looked internally at the resources you have and those you might need. You have also considered the importance of aligning them appropriately, focusing on what might be distinctive or different about them, and how that will allow you to make a difference. So how do you sustain any advantage you have? Firstly, you need to keep an eye on both your internal and external environments.

As competitive advantage can erode over time, here is a useful set of things to ask yourself using the acronym VIRO. Are the capabilities and resources you have access to:

valuable, i.e. valuable to the enterprise
inimitable, i.e. difficult to imitate
rare, i.e. hard to acquire
organisational, i.e. organised in such a way that your organisation can take advantage of them and exploit them?

Activity 5 Maintaining competitive advantage

Allow about 20 minutes

Pick one specific resource or capability that you believe to be a point of differentiation for your enterprise or another you are familiar with. Use the template below to put it into the framework, answering ‘Y’ (yes) or ‘N’ (no) for each category.

Table 2 Points of differentiation

Resource or capability	Valuable	Rare	Inimitable	Exploited by the organisation
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Discussion

The table below provides the ‘standard answers’ and strategic implications of those answers. However, like any of these tables or tools it is the process – the discussions that lead to filling in the blanks – which will help you most.

Valuable	Rare	Inimitable	Exploited by the organisation	Implication
N				Disadvantage
Y	N			Parity
Y	Y	N		Temporary advantage
Y	Y	Y	N	Advantage insufficiently used
Y	Y	Y	Y	Sustained advantage

OpenLearn - Entrepreneurship – from ideas to reality
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