Looking beyond resources: Exploring the importance of entrepreneurship to firm-level competitive advantage in technologically intensive industries

The resource-based view of the firm (RBV) suggests that in order to attain and sustain a competitive advantage firms must possess and exploit valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable resources. Despite the focus on exploitation, empirical work in this area has focused primarily on resource possession. By infusing this traditional view of the RBV with ideas from the dynamic capabilities approach and the entrepreneurship literature, this paper presents conceptual arguments about the exploitation of resources through the development of specific capabilities. The empirical results suggest that entrepreneurial capacity and entrepreneurial management are important capabilities that help in building competitive advantage for firms in technologically intensive industries.