Annals of Business Administrative Science
Online ISSN : 1347-4456
Print ISSN : 1347-4464
ISSN-L : 1347-4456
Reconsideration of Characteristics of Information-Based Resource
Takeaki WADA
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JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS

2016 Volume 15 Issue 2 Pages 75-87

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Abstract

Business management research in Japan categorizes resources into four categories: people, goods, money, and information. Among these, there has been a strong focus on information-based resources, which are company-specific. The notion that these resources are the basis of competitive advantage and inimitability has been considered the reason that Japanese companies exhibited a high level of international competitiveness in the 1980s. However, Japan’s international competitiveness has been declining since the 1990s. In fact, (a) information-based resources include not only information but also the capability to utilize that information, (b) resources with low inimitability are mixed in with information-based resources, and (c) information-based resources exhibit stickiness not to companies but to people and goods. Therefore, information-based resources do not automatically become sources of competitiveness. These facts were not comprehended until the 1980s, because Japanese companies were unconsciously able to accumulate information-based resources with high inimitability through Japanese-style management systems, like the lifetime commitment system. However, these preconditions for Japanese competitiveness were lost in the 1990s, resulting in an outflow of information-based resources embodied in workers and the decline of Japanese companies’ international competitiveness.

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© 2016 Global Business Research Center. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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