Technical capabilities that enhance creativity

technical capabilities that enhance creativity, efficiency, flexibility, speed or
quality in an organisation’s business process;
.
organisational capabilities that help in mobilising employees, fostering
organisational learning and facilitating organisational changes; and
.
strategic capabilities that enable the organisation to create, integrate, coordinate
its multiple streams of knowledge and competencies and reconfigure and
redeploy them among changing market opportunities.
Deregulation and privatisation of infrastructure provision in recent years has no doubt
brought challenges and difficulties to infrastructure organisations. It has changed the
whole structure and environment of the business dynamic. In times of rapid change
and high uncertainty such as those experienced by infrastructure organisations, Ma
(2000) suggested that kinetic advantages would be more likely to produce sustainable
superior performance.
Ma (1999) also suggested that an organisation’s competitive advantage over a rival
could be homogeneous or heterogeneous. When an organisation and its rivals are
competing in basically the same way using similar or homogeneous strengths and skills,
the organisation’s advantage over rivals, if any, will likely be deriving from doing
the same thing better. Such advantage is regarded as homogeneous advantage.
An organisation can also enjoy heterogeneous advantage over rivals by playing the
game differently or playing a totally different game such as better serving the customers
through different skills, resource combinations or products from those of its rivals.
Infrastructure organisations have, in the past, competed based on homogenous
advantage, that is, using similar strengths and skills because they are traditionally
managed by government and semi-government organisations. However, in the recent
shift towards deregulation and privatisation where the emphasis is focused on
customer and accountability of results, infrastructure organisations must consider
playing the game differently. They must now look at heterogeneous advantages in
order to sustain their performance.
In summary, the above discussion has illustrated the relevance of the RBV paradigm
for improving the performance of infrastructure organisation taking into account
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the changes in the operating environment. Both the kinetic and heterogeneous
advantages are the major emphases of the RBV concept. The core argument of RBV is
based on organisation heterogeneity: unique, difficult-to-imitate and firm-specific
resources that generate competitive advantage (Barney, 2001). In addition, competitive
advantage is not and will not be static; over time its competitors will endanger the
organisation’s position by either imitating its products or developing substitute
products. The organisation has to renew its stock of valuable resources to sustain its
competitive position (Dierickx and Cool, 1989). To this end, the following section will
adopt the tenets of the RBV paradigm to develop a conceptual framework for identifying
internal