LD is the owner and manager of her own florist business, LD Flowers. Although starting out initially as a hobby, it has developed into a sustainable business. LD's original business was based on using only flowers from her garden, but as the business has grown she has been forced to searching alternative supplies of flowers. Though, she has remained loyal to her ethical stance by choosing and buying her flowers only from local growers that she knows. She feels that this, together with her particular design of contemporary flower arrangements, differentiates LD Flowers from the other local florists and supermarkets which tend to offer more traditional arrangements using flowers imported from overseas.
Explain the theoretical principles of the Resource Based View (RBV), and the extent to which LD's business, LD Flowers, has developed its competitive benefit by using the RBV.
The underlying principles of the resource based view are that sustainable competitive advantage depends on an organisation’s possession of unique resources or distinctive capabilities that cannot be simply replicated by its competitors. This view contends that internal resources are more important for a firm than external factors in making and sustaining competitive benefits.
The resource based view emphasises developing or stretching internal capability and unique resources, as it is sometimes referred to as the 'inside out' approach to method.
A key principle of the resource based view is the possession of scarce resources and exploiting these in order to attain competitive benefit. In the case of LD's business this means the identification of resources by LD Flowers is improved than that of its competitors and that superior competitive performance results from her use of internal resources and capabilities.