Prioritization of Strategic Intangible Assets in Make/Buy Decisions

Franco Maria Battagello, Livio Cricelli and Michele Grimaldi
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Franco Maria Battagello: Department of Business Engineering, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, 00133 Rome, Italy
Livio Cricelli: Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Naples “Federico II”, 80125 Naples, Italy
Michele Grimaldi: Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering, University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, 03043 Cassino, Italy

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 5, 1-25

Abstract: Every company, in a knowledge-based economy and, in a sustainability-aware era, is “doomed” to deal with a critical mass of strategic assets, in order to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Maintaining this system up-to-date requires financial/organizational efforts. Therefore, in order to optimize performance, it is necessary to detect which are the assets that can be outsourced/externalized without jeopardizing the business model architecture. Nevertheless, several studies confirm the inherent risks upcoming with any decision of outsourcing; pursuing a bearable long-term advantage over competitors mostly involves combinations of resources and capabilities, i.e., intangible assets. By the means of a multi-criteria indicator, the proposed framework builds a quantitative relational ranking of such resources, disclosing their critical weight (revealing which assets are actually strategic), hence the convenience for each of them to be outsourced or kept “in-house” to create sustainable value. This solution permits a strategy-level prioritization to take informed decisions on outsourcing candidates, also returning further analytics on the status of each investigated entity. Designed as a discriminating tool in make/buy resolutions to be used alongside traditional cost-based criteria, it represents a comprehensive approach capable of appreciating the complexity of the problem and the involved risks in order to keep a sustainable momentum.

Keywords: intangible assets; strategic capital; sustainable competitive advantage; sustainable value; make/buy; outsourcing; strategic alignment; decision support; resource allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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