Leveraging knowledge assets: combinative capabilities – theory and practice

Since the publication of Prahalad and Hamel's (1990) seminal paper on core competencies, leveraging technological competencies has become a topic in the resource-based literature. This paper focuses on the creation of combinative capabilities and explains the logic of leveraging resources by combining them. Furthermore, the paper explains on which company levels combinations can be expected to occur and how firms can apply combinations to commercial ends. A case study illustrates one possible way for firms to support such combinations and describes how companies can develop a new organisational form for R&D that is more able to overcome the limitations of functional and divisional forms of R&D.