Sustaining competitive advantage through strategic operational research: a resource-based view

At present, how to achieve sustainable competitive advantage (SCV) is becoming an important issue in business management. Previous literature proved that there is a relationship between strategic operational research (SOR) and SCV. However, the evolution mechanism from SOR to SCA has not been explained so far. In this paper, we discuss the definition of SOR from six dimensions, i.e. initiation, corporate strategy, competitive advantage, competitive forces, organizational change, and the level of managerial support or involvement. Then, we explained how SOR can be a source of SCA in the resource-based view from the aspects of value, rarity, durable, non-replication, and non-substitution. Further, we breakthrough the traditional "up-to-down" management, and discuss the evolution mechanism with "down-to-up" management. We propose that the key point of evaluation mechanism from SOR to SCV is the jumping process between different firm levels, which is caused by four kinds of aggregate effects, i.e. consistency aggregation, efficiency aggregation, competitive aggregation, and advantage aggregation. Meanwhile, knowledge flows from functional level to corporate level improving the sustainable of competitive advantage.