Identifying and assessing valuable resources and core capabilities in public organizations

Abstract

The resource-based view has been one of the most relevant theoretical approaches in Strategic Management. However, its use has not been widespread in public management practice and research. This work aims to apply its premises to public organizations to support strategy formulation. To that end, a set of deductive procedures has been designed to identify the organization's valuable resources and its core capabilities. These procedures seek to reinforce the coherence between the internal diagnosis and the organization's objectives and to make that diagnosis more systematic and exhaustive. They have been applied to a Spanish University to illustrate its utility. Points for practitioners This work applies the prescriptions of the resource-based view to public organizations. The practical implications of this work are straightforward, since it consists of some procedures for internal diagnosis in public organizations. This internal analysis enables the identification of the valuable resources and core capabilities of public administrations, these being the basic units of the internal environment. The determination of these resources and capabilities forms the groundwork to build up the strategy of the organization.