Competing with ordinary resources

Forthcoming in MIT Sloan Management Review.

Frédéric Fréry, Xavier Lecocq, Vanessa Warnier

In July 2007, TomTom NV, the European Personal Navigation Device manufacturer, launched a

takeover bid on TeleAtlas, a Dutch provider of cartographic data. The initial offering was €21.25 per

share and TeleAtlas shareholders responded positively. However, in the meantime, Nokia, the Finnish

cell-phone manufacturer, announced the acquisition of NavTeq, TeleAtlas’ main competitor, for an

astounding price of $8.1bn, making clear that smartphones would include navigation services in the

future. The control of cartographic databases suddenly became a strategic imperative in the GPS

industry. In reaction, TomTom’s main competitor, Garmin, tried to secure its access to what was now

considered as a strategic resource, and made an offer on TeleAtlas at €24.50 per share. Tomtom raised

the stakes at 30€ per share and eventually acquired TeleAtlas. However, according to the infamous

“winner’s curse”, the excessive price of €2.9bn soon drove the victor into financial collapse: Tomtom

was forced to borrow €1.6bn to settle the bid, just when its market started to decline—notably because

of GPS-enabled smartphones. From 2008 to 2013, TomTom’s revenues plunged 45 %. In 2011, it made

a record €438m loss. However, this sacrifice proved almost useless, since the Israeli software company

Waze had launched its community-driven navigation smartphone application in 2010. Waze’s business

model was radically different from TomTom’s: its cartographic data was directly collected from the

users, at zero cost. Five years after the takeover on TeleAtlas, it is clear that TomTom paid €2.9bn for a

resource that rivals can now obtain for free. This example suggests that competing on unique, rare and

inimitable resources can sometimes be risky, because acquiring and protecting such resources is

inherently costly. Indeed, most companies in the industry are seeking to obtain them. Of course,

strategic resources yield superior competitive advantage, but their cost can sometimes outweigh their

benefit. A promising complement to strategic resources could consist in competing with ordinary

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resources. In this article, we contend that ordinary resources may play an important role in successful

strategies.

During the last three decades, research on resources has demonstrated that a sound strategy must rely on

the exclusive control of valuable and rare resources—a distinctive brand name, an unparalleled set of

talents, or an incomparable technology. Extraordinary assets are needed to reach extraordinary goals. In

this view, the essential pillars of strategic success are non-substitutable resources and inimitable

capabilities. Competitive advantage stems from uniqueness and strategy is considered as scarcity’s

child.

However, when a majority of businesses put this theory in practice—or even when its philosophy

impacts their actual strategies—some limitations can emerge. In the meantime, the emergence of new

business models1 that leverage a vast array of ordinary resources—and particularly platform business

models2—questions the relevance of the traditional strategic focus on scarcity-based approaches and

unique resources3. For Example, Airbnb connects an abundant number of room-letters who want to

source out their empty rooms to hirers who are looking for a space for a couple of nights. Airbnb’s user-

friendly website, plain and simple business model and 24/7 customer care service allow people to make

use of their empty rooms in their house, a resource once considered as useless or trivial. Airbnb is

expanding its global reach, with a presence in 34,000 cities and 192 countries. Its growth rate is

astounding: in 2012 and 2013, the site grew by 400 % and 281 % respectively4. Meanwhile, the fastest

growing hotel chains reached a 5 % growth per annum. If it was a traditional hospitality business, with

over 500,000 listings worldwide in 2013, Airbnb would rank 7th worldwide, between Starwood

(315,000 rooms in 2013) and Accor (532,000 rooms in 2013). Hotel chains are now lobbying local or

national authorities to force Airbnb to comply with hospitality regulations, which proves they consider

it is a credible rival. It demonstrates that the hospitality industry—an archetypal capital intensive

business—can be disrupted with a totally different approach, by leveraging discarded assets. As a

consequence, from an empirical perspective, it appears that it is time to highlight the strategic value of

ordinary resources.

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Risks associated with strategic resources

Competing on strategic resources alleges that performance differentials between competitors are a direct

consequence of their resource provision: businesses that hold higher-value resources (people,

technologies, reputation, partnerships, and so on) should benefit from a competitive advantage if they

can manage properly their resources portfolio. As a consequence, in order to keep their strategic value,

resources must be neither perfectly imitable nor substitutable, and businesses must carefully defend

them. This approach explains many successful strategies and its theoretical significance is

unquestionable5.

However, it appears that under certain conditions, a systematic implementation of strategic resources

may lead to several risks. On the contrary, considering the potential of ordinary resources is a way to

mitigate these limitations (see Table 1).

An ordinary resource is a common resource on the market, generally perceived as neutral in terms of

performance. Such a resource is considered, at best, as ensuring competitive parity. If ordinary

resources are not a source a competitive advantage and greater performance, they are generally required

for the firm to function properly. ISO standards in the automobile industry, stores and salespeople in

retailing, websites and logistic competences in e-commerce are ordinary resources.

Table 1: a risk-benefit assessment of resources

Potential risks of strategic resources Potential benefits of ordinary resources

Top talents can capture the value they create. Ordinary talents are easily substitutable.

Competing on rare resources is costly. Ordinary resources are inexpensive.

Day-to-day performance does not rely on uniqueness. Ordinary assets are easily accessible.

Frugal innovation stems from mundane resources and simple

Persistence in exploiting rare resources restrains innovation.
rules are compatible with ordinary assets.

Fascination for “crown jewels” restrains differentiation Platforms-based business models leverage “crowd jewels”.

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There is a strategic trade-off between the high-risk/high-gain combination of strategic resources, and the

low-risk/low-gain pattern of ordinary resources. When designing their strategies, executives must not

neglect this dilemma.

Strategic Resources can capture their own value

The value of a strategic resource can be captured by the resource itself, at the expense of the firm which

is using it: top talented people can use their bargaining power to demand higher compensation. This is

notably the case in global industries where the value generated by top talents is readily accessible and a

profusion of on-line rankings keeps raising the bar: entertainment, professional sports leagues, finance,

or even academia. Talented individuals, once they realize they are strategic resources, may capture a

significant part of the value they are producing. This phenomenon was already noticeable some years

ago6, but the broad diffusion of professional databases and the ubiquitous use of social networks

exacerbate its competitive impact. As a consequence, never tell your key people they are strategic

resources, it would immediately raise their market value.

For instance, over the last twenty years, the average compensation of the top players starring in the

European Soccer Champions League has increased drastically. Since the early 1990s, the average pay

for a soccer player in the British Premier League raised from £1,500 to £33,868 per week, whereas the

average weekly wage in the UK hardly double (from £295 to £656) 7. However, in the meantime, most

of the top clubs in the British Premier League experienced huge losses and/or debt. More than ten years

ago, Gary Lineker, the former captain of the England national soccer team, was already mentioning “Of

course, players are taking too much money out of the game, but they don’t dictate market forces.” 8

Cases of value capture by rare or unique resources can be found in various settings. For instance, a

French film producer recently brought to the fore the idea that French actors were paid too much

compared to the revenues generated by movies, even in the case of blockbusters 9. Indeed, given the pay

earned by top French actors, only a few, if any, French movies turn out into a profit. This situation

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results from the organization of the heavily subsidized French film industry. It also stems from the fact

that actors—and their agents—know their value, and eventually consider that they are worth more than

the expected revenues of the movies they star in.

On the contrary, ordinary talents are by definition easily substitutable. As a consequence, they do not

boast enough bargaining power to capture value at the expense of their employers. Many management

techniques, from classic Taylor’s scientific management to modern knowledge management approaches

specifically aim at codifying knowhow in order to avoid this pitfall. According to Sumantra Ghoshal

and Christopher Bartlett, “ultimately, the job of the manager is to get ordinary people to create

extraordinary results10”. Creating extraordinary results with unique talents may be great, but it is not the

general rule of management.

The ever rising cost of protecting valuable resources

Strategic resource-based business models suffer from performativity: the TomTom case demonstrates

that once a resource is collectively considered as strategic in an industry, it becomes a vital challenge,

and rivals compete to master it. If you postulate a resource is strategic, you may raise its cost up to the

point it outweighs its value. Given this self-fulfilling prophecy, resource-driven businesses are prone to

allocate a significant part of their efforts to control and secure higher-value assets, as exemplified by

numerous patent wars in the electronics or the pharmaceutical industries. Wars for talents in finance or

education are also cases in point, and the rise of global media coverage and professional social networks

amplifies this trend.

Building and securing a portfolio of unique resources can become extremely costly, up to the point the

cost of barriers to imitation exceeds the benefit these resources bear. So-called “patent trolls” thrive on

this ambiguity: in November 2012, a jury ordered Apple to pay VirnetX—which calls itself a “patent

holding company”—$368 million in damage for a patent-infringement complaint. Similarly, in 2006, in

order to avoid a lawsuit on one of its core technologies, Blackberry paid $612.5 million to NTP.

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In contrast, ordinary resources are inexpensive, and since most businesses overlook their strategic

influence, their cost has usually no reason to rise. They can be acquired and secured at a low price, and

even if they do not provide competitive advantage by their own, they may contribute to get it, and are

an essential ingredient to ensure leveraging all strategic resources.

The hollow pursuit of uniqueness

If all competitors in an industry seek to be unique and to possess non-substitutable resources and

inimitable competences, most of them will fail. The quest for unique sources of competitive advantage

is a collective delusion. As a matter of fact, very few businesses possess unique resources and

distinctive competences that fit the environment’s threats and opportunities. Focusing exclusively on

strategic resources does not explain the everyday performance of the vast majority of firms, which

remain profitable and competitive, even if they only display ordinary assets.

Gathering a group of executives in order to help them identify the core competences of their own

business—even with the assistance of a series of practical tools such as an activity mapping or a

benchmarking process—can be a disappointing exercise. If some companies do possess valuable

brands, highly talented people, deep pockets or patented technologies, it does not necessarily provide

them with a true competitive advantage, for some of their rivals often boast a similar resource portfolio.

For instance, in the pharmaceutical industry, main players, such as Pfizer, Sanofi or Roche, present

comparable assets: nothing is truly unique in their R&D capacity or in their marketing approach.

However, this absence of uniqueness does not prevent them from reaching excellent levels of

profitability.

Only very few businesses actually own rare, inimitable and non-substitutable resources. For the vast

majority of firms, trying to master unique resources or incomparable competences is a delusive cul-de-

sac. This was already true in the pre-Internet economic landscape, but the abundance of cognitive

surplus and the proliferation of Web communities escalate the problem.

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On the other hand, the commonness of ordinary resources ensures an easy access to a variety of assets

and competences. These ordinary resources may yield limited competitive advantage, but they are more

the rule than the exception in the day-to-day life of the vast majority of businesses.

Stick-to-the-knitting persistence leads to inertia

If the possession of specific resources is the ultimate explanation for success, innovation poses a

problem: breakthrough ideas and ground-breaking processes can threaten years of patient accumulation

of talents and assets. As a consequence, a by-the-book implementation of a strategic resource-based

approach can lead to inertia. If you are convinced you possess unique resources and core competences,

you will very probably try to defend and leverage them, and refuse to implement any disruptive

innovation that could jeopardize your strategic commitment. By protecting carefully accumulated rare

resources, businesses may repel innovation and change. Of course, in a digital environment, where

ecosystems continually evolve, bits replace atoms and peer-to-peer openness reigns, innovation

becomes inherently serendipitous, and inertia rapidly proves lethal.

Kodak, Sony and Nokia each felt in this resource trap. In 1985, Leo J. Thomas, senior vice president

and Kodak’s director of research, famously told the Wall Street Journal: “It is very hard to find anything

[with profit margins] like color photography that is legal.” At that time, the profit margin of film was

around 80 %. Of course, in order to protect this affluence, Kodak preferred not to switch to digital

camera. As regards Sony, how comes it is not an absolute winner in the MP3 industry? Sony literally

invented digital music and portable music devices. However, in order to protect its unique resources

provision, it also vertically integrated by acquiring what became Sony Music, a global leader in the

music industry. This bold strategic move proved lethal: once owning a large music company, Sony

became very reluctant in entering the MP3 business in the early 2000s, for this industry—a least at that

time—was heavily relying on peer-to-peer piracy. Nokia made a similar mistake: by preserving its

unique competences in design and logistics, it refused to admit that with the launch of the iPhone, Apple

had changed the game from a battle between devices to a war between ecosystems. The combination of

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digitization, open-innovation patterns and networked business models ripped the strategic benefits of

once prominently strategic resources.

On the contrary, the growing interest in frugal innovation11 demonstrates that it is possible to design and

develop convincing solutions by leveraging low-cost technologies and largely available assets. Some of

these frugal innovations—such as the $69 ChotuKool fridge, a tiny refrigerator using the thermoelectric

effect—can even outperform existing technologies. Moreover, leveraging ordinary resources is

consistent with the implementation of simple rules that facilitate the execution of strategies, even in

rapidly changing circumstances12.

Fascination for “crown jewels” prevents differentiation

If the possession of specific and rare resources—i.e. “crown jewels”—is the ultimate source of

competitive advantage, all firms should seek to secure them. However, since these strategic resources

are scarce, there will be few winners and many losers. In order to imitate successful rivals, many

companies will try to mimic their resource provision. The belief in the superiority of key resources may

therefore lead many companies to focus on a small part of the spectrum of available resources, which

may restrain their innovation capability. Focusing on strategic resources virtually condemns rivals to an

average performance, because differentiation vanishes.

Cynthia Montgomery already observed this phenomenon of fascination for the “crown jewels” and

called for the inclusion of the complete range of resources, i.e. the good, the bad, and the boring 13. To be

useful, the typology of resources cannot be limited to a binary opposition: strategic resources (i.e. rare

and very valuable ones) on the one hand, and all the negligible rest on the other. Indeed, the cost of

strategic resources can be greater than their value, and ordinary resources can provide a competitive

advantage in at least two situations:

1. Without the leverage of ordinary resources, strategic resources cannot always deliver their full-

fledged competitive potential.

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2. The low-cost massification of ordinary resources through platform business models 14 can outweigh

the detention of a few unique strategic assets: “crowd jewels” are a valuable substitute to “crown

jewels”.

We will now explore these two situations.

Ordinary resources as strategic enablers

Strategic resources have limited value if you cannot enable them. Business models focusing on strategic

resources usually underestimate the necessity of ordinary assets, day-to-day activities, and common

talents you must leverage in order to achieve the full-fledged potential of the few strategic resources

you master. Moreover, firms are usually unable to develop or gather strategic resources in every domain

of their business. In many respects, it would be pointlessly costly in terms of search costs or internal

development to seek unique resources for every task involved in a whole value chain. Ordinary

resources are a cheap and necessary way to leverage unique assets, which allows replication and

scalability.

The availability of ordinary resources enables the duplication of a business model in many business

units and/or in many countries. If such a replication is a key success factor —such as in retailing15—,

extending a business model through the acquisition of ordinary resources is much easier —and much

cheaper—than implementing a business model relying on unique assets. By definition, strategic

resources are rare, expensive and difficult to replicate.

For instance McDonald’s Corporation is world’s largest chain of fast food restaurants with more than

35,000 restaurants in more than 100 countries. It has been created in 1955 and has achieved this

wonderful development in less than 60 years. While top brand, efficient processes, and premium

location of restaurants are frequently cited as the main strategic resources of the company, the

replication of McDonald’s business model is only permitted by ordinary resources: more than

1.8 million employees worldwide. McDonald’s does not recruit massively from the best business

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schools to fulfill brand promise, but millions of young adults worldwide got their first job with the

company, helping to keep wage bills down. Far from being talented human resources described in

human resource management books, most McDonald’s employees are not highly qualified, are part-time

workers and can be easily replaced. However, the McDonald’s brand can only be leveraged thanks to

these ordinary resources. Thus, while scalability (i.e. the ability of a business to grow and develop

without major organizational barriers) may be related to cultural and cognitive dimensions 16, it also

depends on the type of resources on which it builds. When they are used to leverage strategic resources,

ordinary resources allow scalability.

Creating value with a mass of ordinary resources

Ordinary resources—not only unique ones—can yield strategic benefits, and eventually become the

basis of competitive advantage17. They can play a central role in the emergence of new business models.

This evolution may give rise to drastic changes in the competitive landscape in a given industry, and

eventually lead to the emergence of new markets. For instance, the creation of the low-cost business

model in the airline industry by Southwest Airlines in the early 1970s is generally explained by a unique

blend of operational constraints and entrepreneurial ingenuity. However, it also derives from the fact

that Southwest Airlines was endowed with ordinary resources (access to small regional airports, old

airplanes, and inexperienced workforce) while it was lacking what was perceived at that time as

strategic assets (hub airports, connections, diversified fleet of airplanes, etc.)18. So, it is possible to

develop extraordinary performance and to gain competitive advantage by combining and leveraging

ordinary resources.

Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding strategies are two great types of business models based on ordinary

resources. Kickstarter, Instagram, or Quirky are some examples of firms which build their business

models on the development of a mass of ordinary resources. The ability to leverage massive amounts of

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mundane talents and trivial assets through a platform and its ecosystem is not only a game changer; it

questions the very principles of by-the-book strategies 19:

 The sharing of small units of available resources by the crowd is a successful business model for

Kickstarter. The concept of Kickstarter, where potential investors can invest as low as $1 to finance

innovating projects, has created an industry of its own, and many competitors are jumping on the

bandwagon: the worldwide funding volume of the crowdfunding industry reached $5.1bn in 2013 20,

with a +90 % annual growth. Indeed, it is a crowd of people, their abundant little pennies and an

ample number of competing projects that yield success, not unique assets, high fixed costs and

unparalleled talents.

 In February 2013, just two and a half years after its launch, Instagram, the picture-sharing platform,

announced 100 million monthly active users, 40 million new pictures posted every day, and

8,500 likes on Facebook (now its parent company) and 1,000 comments every second. Even if only

a minuscule fraction of these photos are worth a significant economic value, no professional image

database can expect to compete, whatever the talent of their photographs and the richness of their

archives.

 The use of the collective intelligence of a mass of ordinary people is at the heart of Quirky. This

collaborative platform has developed a unique value proposition: to transform good ideas into

ready-to-market products. Quirky’s process is quite unique. Anyone can submit ideas for new

products on the Quirky.com website. Then the Quirky community discusses the ideas and votes for

their favorites. If an idea is accepted, a team of Quirky developers builds the prototype in constant

interaction with all voters. If the product reaches a minimum number of orders, it is launched in

production and the Quirky marketing team is responsible for the valorization with retailers. The

inventor of the idea and the voters who contributed to it—they are called influencers—receive

royalties based on product sales. Quirky’s best-selling product is the Pivot Power, a flexible power

strip invented by Jake Zien and 708 influencers. It brought hundreds of thousands of dollars to its

inventor, and several thousand dollars to community members who contributed to the product

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 development. Quirky receives a monthly average of 50,000 ideas, but since the creation of the

website, members of the community have enabled the development of 399 products. The

mobilization of thousands of contributors can implement a highly reliable and inexpensive selection

process.

It appears that strategic success can derive from an abundance of ordinary resources. As a consequence,

instead of only focusing on unique resources, executives should also leverage a vast surplus of mundane

talents. As Nobel Prize laureate Philip Anderson wrote in 1972, “More is different”: beyond a certain

size, a system is endowed with new capabilities that significantly differ from what its various

constituents can offer. In business, it implies that the traditional strategic paradigm, based on the tight

ownership of competitive-advantage generating assets, loses its significance when the wisdom of

millions of people are involved, when ordinary resources are combined to achieve extraordinary

performance. Here are the critical points of the “more is different” pattern:

1. Platform   business­models   harness   the   hidden   value   of   ordinary   resources.  Traditionally,

executives overlook ordinary resources. Indeed, these resources are not scarce, show no significant

value and are widely used by standard business models. As a consequence, ordinary resources stay

under   the   radar   of   strategic   plans.   In   their   benchmarking   processes,   companies   focus   on   new

capabilities,   and   new   resources   but   they   do   not   investigate   the   potential   value   creation   from

ordinary   resources,   existing   knowledge   and   usual   talents.   However,   our   examples   show   that

innovative entrepreneurs can develop new services from a mass of ordinary resources.

2. The strategic resource is the platform, not the assets it leverages. The main challenge consists in

designing an attractive platform—which in that case is a true strategic resource—in order to capture

scattered ordinary assets and talents. Indeed, while strategic resources are concentrated, ordinary

resources   can   be   highly   distributed   between   different   firms   which   may   belong   to   different

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 industries. However, without the ordinary resources to fuel it, the platform has limited strategic

value. It is the combination between the platform and the mass of ordinary resources that create

sustained competitive advantage.

3. Make sure the cost of the platform does not outweigh its value. By leveraging 2.0 technologies,

entrepreneurs can significantly reduce the cost of harnessing collective wisdom. However, as a

strategic resource, the platform bares all the risks we highlight: exploiting a vast amount of data,

people or initiatives can be costly, rare talents can capture value, protecting the platform can hinder

innovation, and competing platforms bare the risk of adopting a herd mentality. As a consequence,

the platform must remain open, frugal and scalable.

Consequences on strategic management

According to Chris Anderson’s famous “Long Tail” concept, it is time firms stop focusing their

marketing efforts on flagship products to the detriment of more ordinary ones 21. We make the same

observation about the resources portfolio: businesses should consider the “Long Tail of Resources” and

stop analyzing their resources portfolio through the sole prism of uniqueness and scarcity. Many

executives dedicate a disproportionate amount of attention to strategic resources and neglect the rest of

the resources spectrum. When properly exploited, overlooked ordinary resources unveil untapped profit

pools.

Taking into account the implications of ordinary resources opens new business perspectives. Along with

focusing on protecting and possessing strategic resources, organizations should also consider ordinary

resources as performance drivers. However, in order to create value with ordinary resources,

organizations must leverage their unique characteristics though innovative business models (see

Table 2).

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 Table 2: Strategic Resources and Ordinary Resources

Business models focused Business models focused on

on strategic resource ordinary resources

Scarcity Abundance
Availability of resources
(Unique and protected) (Available or discarded)

Openness towards
Ownership/Protection Sharing/Access
resources

Value perception of
resources by most High Value Low value
companies

Cost of acquisition High Cost Low Cost

Our key message is that a strategic value proposition does not necessarily derive from unique resources

and core competences. Acquiring and mastering unique resources undoubtedly yields competitive

advantage, but it can be extremely costly, and building barriers to imitation can erode your future

competitive advantage: focusing on unique strengths implies specialization, and if you try to become a

one-trick pony, sooner or later the trick will be matched by competitors. Innovations can undermine the

market value of a portfolio of superior assets. By focusing on securing unique resources, executives

may jeopardize the agility of their business and their ability to sustain a competitive advantage. Just like

the Wikipedia anonymous crowd and its improvised bricolage outrivaled Microsoft Encarta and its

deliberately crafted strategy, TomTom spent €2.9bn to secure cartographic data its community-driven

competitor Waze obtained for free.

By eroding established barriers to imitation, ordinary resource-based business models may disrupt the

business landscape. In a whole array of industries (retail, manufacturing, banking, automobile,

hospitality, higher education, etc.), enabling the power of strategic resources require mundane assets,

and leveraging massive amounts of ordinary resources through platforms and ecosystems could be as

profitable as securing unique possessions and/or talents. Instead of promoting secrecy and defending

industrial property rights at all cost, powerful incumbents should reconsider the deterrence of their

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distinctive assets and contest the taken-for-granted assumptions that underlie their success.

Overconfidence and inertia lurk in the blind spot of some resource-based strategies, whereas frugal

innovation and crowdsource-based approaches are gaining increasing attention. Ordinary resources

were once overlooked and considered as negligible strategic assets. Rapidly expanding platform

business models question this bias, and it is time executives start exploiting the Long Tail of resources.

About the Research

This article draws on a research program carried out in the last 7 years. We have conducted in-depth case study
research on Rocket Internet, AgoraVox, Chronostock, Primark, Accor, Yahoo!, Carrefour, Publicis Omnicom,
Benetton, Dell, Renault Nissan, Dacia, Kering, Iliad, Arsenal Football Club, and Specialistern. Our goal was to
identify processes related to resources in various kinds of business models. To do so, we used both primary and
secondary sources. We also supervised a series of in-the-field strategic analyses with Executive MBA
participants, focusing on the resource base of their organization.

Then, we questioned a sample of 768 CEOs about their strategy development processes, in order to identify the
actual role of the different types of resources in gaining and sustaining competitive advantage. We
complemented our empirical research on ordinary resources with a systematic literature review of peer-
reviewed articles dedicated to resources and business models.

15
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3
In this paper we have chosen to look at the integration and leveraging of resources through the « business model » lens.
However, other lenses such as « resource orchestration » framework could have been convoked. For a detailed account
of this approach, see for instance : Sirmon D.G., Hitt M.A., Ireland R.D., Gilbert B.A. (2011), “Resource Orchestration
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https://www.airbnb.com/annual/ and Upstart Business Journal, “AirBnB releases impressive 2012 numbers”, 7th Feb
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Stakeholder Bargaining Power”, Organization Science, 10, pp. 119-133.
7
Daily Mail, “Too many average footballers are millionaires… They drive Ferraris but they deserve a Reliant Robin”, Joe
Bernstein, 9 Jan 2011.
8
The Telegraph, “Even football stars agree – They are paid too much”, Martin Bentham, 06 Oct. 2002.
9
New Yorker, “The Future of French Cinema”, Richard Brody, 3 Jan. 2013.
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Ghoshal S., Bartlett C.A. (1999), The Individualized Corporation: A Fundamentally New Approach to Management,
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Roberts K., Radjou N., Prabhu N., Ahuja S. (2012), Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate
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74.
13
Montgomery C. A. (1995), “Of Diamonds and Rust: A New Look at Resources”, in Resource-Based and Evolutionary
Theories of the Firm: Towards a Synthesis, Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 251-268.
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Gawer A., Cusumano M.A. (2002), Platform Leadership, Harvard Business School Press.
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Winter, S.G, and Szulanski, G. (2001), “Replication as Strategy”, Organization Science, Vol. 12, N° 6, pp. 730-743.
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Sutton, R.I., and Rao, H. (2014), Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less, Crown Publishing :
New York.
17
Warnier V., Weppe X., Lecocq X. (2013), "Extending Resource-Based Theory: Considering strategic, ordinary and junk
resources", Management Decision, Vol. 51, No 7, pp. 1359-1379.
18
Warnier V., Weppe X., Lecocq X., op. cit.
19
Hagiu A. (2014), “Strategic Decisions for Multisided Platforms”, MIT Sloan Management Review, Vol. 55, No°2,
pp. 71-80.
20
http://www.crowdmapped.com/crowdfunding-trends-and-statistics/
21
Anderson C., The Long Tail, Hyperion, 2006.