How Does the Development of Core Competencies Provide Both Advantages and Disadvantages for an Organisation?

Investopedia defines core competencies as “the main strengths or strategic advantages of a business.” Furthermore Investopedia describes core competencies as “the combination of pooled knowledge and technical capacities allowing a business to be competitive in the marketplace.” (Investopedia 2014). Considering these definitions, the following are Croc’s core competencies:

All companies have core competencies that they use to differentiate their company, product, or service from the competition, Sears is no exception. Also, it is common for a company’s core competencies to change, as their industry progresses through phases and shifts its emphasis between product and process innovations (Regis University, 2011), Sears is no exception. Yet, when a company’s core competencies become misaligned and no longer supports their strategic intent the business is in danger of becoming obsolete (Regis University, 2011), as their customers no longer perceive the unique benefits the company has

The objective of the Cisco executives is to emphasis consideration on competencies that truly affect its competitive advantage. Cisco core competency comes from the precise group of talents and manufacturing practices that bring extra value to the. These competencies allowed Cisco to enter an extensive range of markets.

Core competencies are the capabilities that are critical to a business achieving competitive advantage. The starting point for analysing core competencies is recognising that competition between businesses is as much a race for competence mastery as it is for market position and market power. (Prahalad and Hamel)

Core competencies are set of skills, expertise and professionalism which the service is executed (Johnston & Clark 2001). They make a firm to stand apart and develop a competitive advantage.

Core Competencies: The Company is full of assurance and potential. Each and every day represents a new opportunity to share Vision, strategy and style.

Every person gravitate its strengths to step up in life like the best cook in a family makes meals. The mechanically inclined person in a family fixes the broken parts at home and a plant lover takes care of the garden. Similarly, the businesses use their strengths to position themselves in the market. However they follow a formal path for developing core competencies. Successful businesses follow an exact approach to identify and define their core competencies and then jointly follow them. For example, Auto manufacturers restrict themselves only to the tasks that they do best like assembling or designing automobiles, leaving additional tasks for others. This keeps their mission clear and defined.

Competencies can be used to provide the behaviours needed at work to achieve the business strategy, and enable organisations to form a model of the kinds of employee it wishes to attract through recruitment.

Wal-Mart is a company that has taken its core competencies, which are the capabilities the firm emphasizes and performs especially well while pursuing its vision (Ireland, Hoskisson, Hitt, 2008), and turned them into competitive advantages. Core competencies must satisfy four characteristics in order to be a competitive advantage. These advantages, according to our text, include: *valuable, *rare, *difficult to imitate,*nonsubstitutable.

Core competencies are the most significant value creating skills within a company and key areas of expertise that are distinctive to a company and critical to the company's long-term growth. Core competencies are the pieces that a company is superior than its competitors in the critical, central areas of the company where the most value is added to its products. These areas of expertise may be in any area from product development to employee dedication. A competence which is central to business's operations but which is not exceptional in some way is not considered as a core competence, as it will not generate a differentiated advantage over rival businesses. It follows from the concept of core competencies; resources that are

Through an internal environment analysis, companies can identify and understand their own unique resources, capabilities, and competencies that are required for their sustainable competitive advantage. Resources, capabilities, and core competencies are the foundation of competitive advantage. There is no competitive advantages are permanently sustainable in any companies, so they have to consist on their current advantages and develop new advantages by internally understanding and analyzing their resources and capabilities. Competitors have their own unique resources, capabilities, and core competencies to create values for their customers. Both tangible and intangible resources, which include individual, social and organizational phenomena, are combined to generate capabilities. In turn, company’s capabilities are used to build core competencies. Also, core competencies are as a source of competitive advantage for a company to win in the competitive market.

Threats: Nokia phones once dominated the phone market. However, it failed to see the threats from smartphone and the new phone manufacturer, and thus the brand Nokia faced serious strike and almost disappeared until recent.

To begin with, heterogeneity of capabilities and resources of firms, which is explained as “enduring and systematic performance differences among relatively close rivals”, provides a foundation of the resource-based view (Song, et al.,2006). The implication of this assumption is that core competence conveys the valuable and unique feature of products to customers. The RBV disagrees with the opinion that the resources are homogeneous; if homogeneity is assumed to be essential to develop a proper strategy, the strategy can be easily copied by competitors, which will ultimately result in the dissipation of above-normal rents. Conversely, the unique and fixed resources on hand will lead to outstanding performance and ultimately turn to be a competitive advantage, under the circumstances that sustainable competitive advantage is achieved in an environment where competition does not exist.

Core competency is said to resource allocation, capabilities, knowledge, skills, and expertise along side price chain. It wants 3 elements: skills, resources and processes, and it is communication,

According to Griffin & Pustay (2005), a core competency is a distinctive strength or advantage that is central to a firm¡¦s operations, and by utilising its core competency in new markets, the firm is able to increase