What is important when assessing the competitive power of company resources?

When assessing the competitive power of a company's resources, it is vital to evaluate whether the resource is genuinely competitively valuable, rare, and hard to imitate. This criterion stems from the Resource-Based View (RBV), which posits that resources must possess these characteristics to provide a sustainable competitive advantage.

If a resource is competitively valuable, it means it can enable the company to perform activities more efficiently or effectively than its rivals. Rarity ensures that not all competitors have access to this resource, giving the company an edge over them. Moreover, if a resource is hard to imitate, it prevents competitors from duplicating the advantage, thereby maintaining the company's superior position in the market over time.

In contrast, while differentiation and customer perception of resources are important, they are, in themselves, reliant on the foundational attributes of the resources in question. Therefore, the characteristics of being valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate are essential for truly understanding the competitive power of resources.