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ACCA Strategic Professional · Strategic Business Leader · Concepts of strategy

Altamira Logistics owns a fleet of trucks that any competitor could lease. However, its dispatch team has spent ten years developing coordination routines and shared know-how that let it reroute shipments faster than rivals, and this is hard to see or copy. According to the resource-based view (Barney's VRIO), which statement best describes the source of sustainable advantage?

The sustainable advantage lies in the dispatch team's embedded competence. Trucks can be leased by anyone, so they are not rare or inimitable, whereas the tacit, socially complex routines are valuable, rare and difficult to imitate, meeting the resource-based view criteria.

  1. AThe trucks, because they are valuable tangible resources
  2. BThe competence embedded in the dispatch routines, because it is valuable, rare and difficult to imitateCorrect
  3. CThe trucks, because tangible assets are always the hardest to imitate
  4. DNeither, because advantage can only come from market positioning

Explanation

Trucks can be leased, so they are not rare or inimitable. The dispatch routines are valuable, rare, causally ambiguous and socially complex, so they are costly to imitate and support sustained advantage. Option C reverses the usual logic, since intangible, tacit capabilities are typically harder to copy.

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