Established model
The resource-based view
Birger Wernerfelt · 1984
Look at a company as a bundle of resources rather than a set of products, and advantage comes from what it holds.
Its place in the frameworkBusiness Core›Business Assets
What it does
The move is to analyse the firm from the resource side — what it owns, knows and controls — instead of from the market side. It matters for assets because it takes seriously the things that never appear on a balance sheet: a customer base, an accumulated dataset, a reputation, a way of working that took ten years to build.
- Reach for it when
- When taking stock of what a business actually has, particularly the parts nobody thought to write down.
- Where it stops
- It is a way of seeing rather than a procedure, and it is weak on change — a resource that carried a company for a decade can be worth nothing the year the market turns.
Birger Wernerfelt, “A Resource-Based View of the Firm”, Strategic Management Journal, 1984.
Why it sits at Business Assets
What the organisation owns and can put to work — premises, equipment, technology, intellectual property, capital. The things that remain when the people go home.
A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:
- Asset registerStandard asset management practice; the register is the control that makes utilisation and lifecycle work possible.
- Intellectual propertyIP management practice, and the accounting distinction between recognised intangibles and internally generated ones that never appear on the balance sheet.
- UtilisationAsset utilisation measurement, including overall equipment effectiveness where production assets are involved.
- LifecycleTotal cost of ownership and lifecycle costing, which consistently show purchase price to be a minority of the total.
What it touches elsewhere
Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Business Assets lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.
- Business CoreAssets are what core competencies are often built on, and what finance has to fund.
- Data CoreData is an asset, and one of the few that appreciates with use.
- Time CoreReplacement cycles and maintenance windows are timing decisions.
- Goal CoreA goal requiring capacity the asset base cannot provide is a capital decision in disguise.
Filed at the same place
These answer questions that arise at Business Assets too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.
- The growth–share matrixSort what the business owns by how fast its market is growing and how strong its position in it is, and fund each kind differently.
Elsewhere in Business Core
- Tuckman’s stages of group development
- Belbin Team Roles
- Herzberg’s two-factor theory
- Jobs to be done
- The Kano model
- The value proposition canvas
- The business model canvas
- The Van Westendorp price sensitivity meter
- Value-based pricing
- Core competence
- VRIO
- The theory of constraints
- Lean thinking
- Co-opetition and the value net
- Transaction cost economics
- Stakeholder theory
- The power–interest grid
- DuPont analysis
- Break-even and cost–volume–profit analysis
- Unit economics
- The Kraljic Matrix
- The bullwhip effect
- The SCOR Model
- On-time in-full
- Overall equipment effectiveness
- Value stream mapping
- The three lines model
- ISO 31000 risk management
- Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
- Kotter’s eight-step change model
- Situational leadership
- The Lean Startup
- Design thinking
- Porter’s value chain
- The McKinsey 7S framework
- Six Sigma and DMAIC
These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.
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