Rethinking the Resource-Based View: What Barney Got Right - And What He Missed

The Core Premise: Resources Drive Advantage

Barney’s 1991 article proposes that a firm’s resources and capabilities are the source of sustained competitive advantage if they are:

• Valuable: Contribute to efficiency or effectiveness

• Rare: Not widely possessed by competitors

• Inimitable: Difficult to replicate due to history, social complexity, or causal ambiguity

• Non-substitutable: Cannot be replaced by strategically equivalent resources

  
  

Together, these VRIN attributes define the conditions under which a resource can produce superior economic performance (Barney, 1991). The argument marked a departure from earlier strategic thought, notably Porter’s Five Forces model, which placed competitive advantage largely in industry structure and positioning.

RBV was a crucial corrective. It explained why some firms outperform others even within the same industry context. It gave strategists an internal lens. And it opened the door to more nuanced views of firm-specific assets.

But that internal lens was static. In privileging possession over practice, RBV could only offer a snapshot of advantage. What it lacked was an account of movement—how firms change, respond, and renew advantage in the face of volatility.

The Static Trap: RBV Ignores How Advantage Is Sustained

RBV remains strong at diagnosis: it helps us identify what makes a firm distinctive now. But it says little about how firms persist in their advantage—how they sustain, defend, and renew it as conditions evolve.

Barney (1991) briefly acknowledged the need for resource heterogeneity and immobility to persist over time, but did not provide a mechanism for how this happens. The view is implicitly structuralist: it assumes a relatively stable configuration of assets that yield performance, as long as others cannot imitate them. But the modern strategy environment doesn’t behave this way.

Teece, Pisano and Shuen (1997) introduced dynamic capabilities to address precisely this gap. Their framework reframed advantage as a function of an organisation’s ability to sense, seize, and transform in response to shifting opportunities. In contrast to RBV’s focus on internal assets, dynamic capabilities make change the core unit of strategic inquiry.

In today’s high-velocity markets, the challenge isn’t just to own resources that meet VRIN conditions. It’s to continually adapt, recombine, and repurpose those resources as conditions shift. Platforms, ecosystems, AI, and global knowledge diffusion accelerate imitation and devalue even the most protected assets.

As Peteraf and Barney (2003) later noted, RBV was never intended to explain the mechanisms of change. But that is now the dominant challenge in strategy.

The Role of the Organisation: Missing from the Model

Another major limitation of RBV is its underdeveloped treatment of the organisation. While Barney (1991) acknowledges that firms are bundles of resources, the model remains agnostic about the internal configuration that governs how those resources are developed and applied.

This is not a trivial oversight. Organisational structure mediates the development, flow, and recombination of capabilities. Routines, feedback loops, learning structures, and cultural norms are not resources in themselves, but they shape the conditions under which resources retain their strategic relevance.

Earlier work by Nelson and Winter (1982) conceptualised routines as the DNA of firm behaviour, proposing that capability stems from repeatable patterns of action embedded in organisational life. This line of thinking underpins later theories of absorptive capacity (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990), architectural alignment (Henderson & Clark, 1990), and learning organisations (Senge, 1990).

More recently, Eisenhardt and Martin (2000) challenged the idea that dynamic capabilities are inherently rare or inimitable. Instead, they argued that such capabilities follow identifiable patterns that can be learned and transferred. Their view strengthens the argument that organisational design—not just resource possession—drives advantage.

Teece (2007) further sharpened the focus on structure, arguing that firms require “integrative mechanisms” to align sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring activities. Mikalef, Pateli and van de Wetering (2021) provide modern empirical grounding, showing that architecture flexibility and governance decentralisation are critical enablers of dynamic capabilities.

These scholars all point to the same insight: that the organisation is not neutral. It is a designed system of advantage.

RBV in the Age of Architectural Design

The twenty-first century demands a new strategic logic—one that treats advantage not as a possession, but as an emergent property of architectural fitness.

Strategic Architecture, is the connective discipline between vision and execution. It governs how intent becomes implemented, how capability is distributed, and how adaptation is enabled.

It includes decision rights, technology modularity, cultural enablers, and the governance models that underpin responsiveness. It stretches beyond traditional enterprise architecture to include operating model coherence and structural readiness for change.

This shift from resources to readiness reframes strategic enquiry:

• From what we own, to how we change

• From possession, to positioning for responsiveness

• From static assets, to dynamic systems of capability evolution

Where RBV invites us to identify advantage, Strategic Architecture demands we buildit—through deliberate design of the enabling conditions.

Toward a Maintained View of Advantage

The question at the heart of strategy has changed. It’s no longer just what gives us an edge, but how we maintain it.

That means asking:

• How do we renew capabilities without starting from zero?

• What structures support flexibility without sacrificing control?

• How do we detect early signals of erosion and respond in time?

• How can advantage be made self-sustaining through design?

  
  

Barney provided the foundation. But his model does not account for decay, reconfiguration, or transformation. The VRIN framework is a beginning, not a conclusion. What must follow is a theory of organisational adaptability—how advantage survives exposure to change.

The concept of Maintained Competitive Advantage builds on RBV and extends it. It combines dynamic capabilities, architectural readiness, and a feedback-rich operating model. It recognises that organisations succeed not because they own great resources, but because they are designed to convert them into performance repeatedly.

This view is not speculative. It is observable in firms that thrive despite disruption—those with modular platforms, ambidextrous leadership, loosely coupled systems, and a culture of experimentation.

In these organisations, architecture is not a technical layer—it is the spinal logic of strategic agility.