Entrepreneurship: what are the typical capabilities to create competitive resources? A discussion from case studies

It appear that a golden opportunity was missed at the beginning of the 1990's. Several people began to study businesses from the point of view of resources, but very few took the same approach to entrepreneurship (Naman & Slevin, 1993). We believe the reason for this lies in the difficulties to identify the source of and the transformation processes employed for these resources. Yet, the question of the creation of resources is centred around entrepreneurship. An entrepreneur can be defined as someone who wishes to start-up a business primarily using resources he believes he controls. He is the actor who finally enacts his dreams after long consideration and chooses a trajectory that partly determines the nature of his corporate purpose. Both of these are characteristics of the "resource-based" approach. Lastly, an entrepreneur is someone who lives in hope of finding a sustainable place on his target market. To do this, he must differentiate, even if his resources are initially relatively standardised. The question of strategic differentiation based on the exploitation of resources with similar sources, is at the centre of the "resource-based" approach (Peteraf 1993). This takes us back to the assumptions of Edith Penrose (1959). The combination and specific exploitation of resources renders such resources specific and determines their value. In sum, by looking at entrepreneurship from the point of view of resources, we underline that the entrepreneur produces resources, the very act of which modifies his competencies and capabilities. The success or failure of a business creation is partly dictated by what has gone before, which influences the present and future. Therefore, history affects the ability of the entrepreneur to maintain a distinctive spiral comprising three essential characteristics: resources, competencies and organisational capabilities.