Competence Strategies in Organizing Product Development

This paper explores the use of the resource-based view in practice. It focuses upon how managers involved in product development in two different companies interpret what competences are, and how competence strategies relate to organizing product development activities. The interpretations and implications of performing competence strategies are distinctly different in the two companies, and the analysis illuminates how competences may be portrayed as a resource for managers' intervention in organizational practice, whereby competences are seen to be a cause, rather than an effect, of organizational structure, as it is often depicted in the literature. The meaning of resources and competences in practice are mouldable and flexible, and various interpretations of competences are related to local readings of the strategic situation at hand