Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

11.3.1 Resource-Based View and Dynamic Capabilities Revisited

The resource-based view (RBV) has been the dominant framework for understanding competitive advantage since the early 1990s (Barney, 1991; Wernerfelt, 1984). Its core insight, that sustainable advantage derives from valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable resources, rests on an assumption of relative stability. Resources must retain their value long enough for firms to appropriate returns from their possession. Even when environments change, the RBV assumes that certain resources, particularly knowledge-based and socially complex resources, remain valuable across contexts.

Dynamic capabilities theory extended the RBV to address changing environments (Teece et al., 1997; Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000). It argued that competitive advantage in turbulent contexts depends not on static resource stocks, but on capabilities to sense opportunities, seize them through resource recombination, and transform organizational configurations. Yet even dynamic capabilities theory retains key assumptions about environmental legibility and managerial agency. It presumes that firms can sense their environments with sufficient clarity to identify opportunities, that they possess enough autonomy to reconfigure resources in response, and that they can orchestrate transformation through deliberate strategic action (Teece, 2007).

The template-free perspective reveals the limits of these assumptions. In environments shaped by platform architectures and algorithmic governance, resource value becomes radically unstable. What creates advantage today may lose value tomorrow when a platform changes its architecture, ranking algorithm, or policy conditions. Sensing is constrained by epistemic opacity – firms receive signals but cannot fully interpret their meaning or anticipate their implications (Diakopoulos, 2015). Reconfiguration is constrained by external governance structures that limit what firms can do and by partial integration that makes wholesale transformation difficult or impossible. Transformation cannot be orchestrated through deliberate design when organizational form emerges as patchwork and when feedback provides guidance without causal clarity.

Recent empirical work confirms these limits. Heubeck (2023) shows that dynamic capabilities operate through multiple micro-level processes that are difficult to coordinate and often produce inconsistent outcomes. Selma et al. (2024) demonstrate that sensing capabilities are constrained by the quality and interpretability of available information, which in digital environments is often filtered through algorithmic systems. The result is that firms must reconfigure continuously not because they have identified clear opportunities, but because the conditions of viability keep shifting beneath them.

The template-free framework does not reject the RBV or dynamic capabilities theory. It specifies the boundary conditions under which their core assumptions hold and shows how strategic logic must change when those conditions erode. In template-free environments, advantage depends less on possessing superior resources and more on maintaining the capacity for continuous reconfiguration under constraint. Capabilities become less about sensing and seizing opportunities and more about sustaining adaptive movement when causal understanding remains incomplete. The focus shifts from resource stocks to recursive processes, from deliberate orchestration to emergent coordination, and from competitive positioning to the ongoing construction of viability.

Tartalomjegyzék

Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó

Online megjelenés éve: 2026

ISBN: 978 963 664 204 4

Gazdaság

What happens when understanding comes only after action has already begun?

Traditional strategy rests on the assumption that organizations can understand their environment before deciding how to act. Yet the conditions that once allowed organizations to rely on benchmarking, best practices, and proven strategic templates can no longer be taken for granted. Today, organizations increasingly face situations for which no clear roadmap exists. Established assumptions become less reliable, familiar reference points lose their clarity, and strategic decisions must be made before their consequences can be fully understood.

Strategy Without Templates explores how organizations learn, adapt, and navigate environments in which uncertainty is pervasive and established templates are absent or no longer sufficient. Instead of treating strategy as a process of prediction and planning, the book explores how strategic paths take shape through action, experimentation, adjustment, and learning.

A central insight in the book is that temporary solutions are often necessary. What begins as a practical response to an immediate challenge may gradually shape future possibilities in unexpected ways. Some solutions create new opportunities and sources of advantage. Others become constraints that are difficult to overcome.

Hivatkozás: https://mersz.hu/hortovanyi-strategy-without-templates//

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