• Valuable, that is, the resource exploits opportunities or neutralizes threats in a firm's
environment
• Rare among a firm's current and potential competitors
• Imperfectly imitable, that is, other firms do not possess the same resources and cannot
obtain them easily
• Nonsubstitutable with strategically equivalent resources (Ghemawat, 1986; Rumelt, 1987;
Dierickx & Cool, 1989; Peteraf, 1993)