Building a bridge between resource acquisition and resource accumulation

Resource-based theory (RBT) has become one of the dominant perspectives in strategic management, and a very large body of work has developed; yet, there are aspects of RBT that remain underexplored and less developed than others. One of these aspects concerns how the heterogeneous resource positions that lie at the core of RBT come to exist. Two separate mechanisms have been described in the literature-resource acquisition in strategic factor markets and internal resource accumulation. The authors propose that considering these mechanisms jointly can generate insights and lay the groundwork for future work, and they discuss several issues that are critical to developing a more complete theoretical and practical understanding of the creation of heterogeneous resource positions.