Building Technological-innovation-based Strategic Capabilities in a Textile Company in China: a Dynamic Resource-based-view

This paper focuses on the practice of mobilizing key resources to build strategic capabilities based on technological innovation in a textile company in China. We propose an analytical framework on the basis of RBV theory and value chain analysis to determine the pattern of how different bundles of the key resources contributed to the strategic capabilities in our case company. We also adopt a dynamic perspective to explore the evolutionary history of the firm’s strategic-capability-building so as to see the process of how the firm’s key resources contributed to its strategic capabilities. We found that the firm’s technological-innovation-based strategic capabilities were broadly influenced by neither technological resources, nor innovation resources, but organisational culture, human resources and organisational structure, among whom human resources is the most dynamic one. To build strategic capabilities based on technological innovation, firms need to pay as much attention to foster, organise and mobilize their human resources, organisational culture, and organisational structure as, if not more attention than, they pay narrowly to technological resources and innovation resources.