Organizational Theory #2

What core competences give an organization competitive advantage? What are examples of an organization's functional-level strategies?

Core competencies are those capabilities that are critical to a business achieving a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Typically, core competencies can be identified by certain common characteristics -- offering a benefit to the customer, difficult to imitate, uniquely identify the organization and easily leveraged to create many products or operate in many markets (Kern, 2010). The organization that is best able to use its resources to create value is in an ideal position to outperform the competition, thus creating advantage (Jones, 2010). Core competencies tend to change in response to changes in the environment. They are flexible, evolve over time and enable the company to enter apparently different markets with a clear and distinctive brand proposition. Examples of core competencies include manufacturing, research and development, new technology or organizational design...
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