Resumo

The Resource-Based View (RBV) sustained by authors as: Wernerfelt (1984), Barney (1991) and Peteraf (1993), analyses the nature of company´s competence and value as source for competitive advantages. A company is more than an administrative unit, is also a collection of productive resources on which the different managers can take various decisions (Penrose, 1959). This paper approaches the competitive resources to develop the innovative technologies, whose locus are the networks made up of agricultural research institutions for innovation generation.

In the context of organizations focused on innovation, resources, motivation and commitment are crucial elements (Gattaz et al., 2012). Innovation means the one where the technology should hit the market or society (OECD, 2005). To Huggins (2010), the strategy of resource networks through the formation of knowledge networks are more likely to be positively related to better performance. Thus, the present work aims to evaluate which competitive resources influence the innovative technological performance in interorganizational research networks.

Various classifications of company´s resources and capabilities can be found, being the more conventional classification the one which distinguishes between tangible and intangible resources (Wernerfelt, 1984). A company has a sustainable competitive advantage when it implements a strategy to create value (Barney, 1991). However, that the scope of competitive advantage is given by the complementarity of interorganizational resources (Lavie, 2006). Based on the movement of innovation, organizations have been going through a new wave of management strategy transformation (Gattaz et al., 2012).

This research used the maximum similarity, different results (MSDO) and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) for understanding and analysis of the phenomenon investigated. The unit of analysis were 26 inter-organizational networks of research and development of plant breeding, that is, new cultivars. The selected cases were the most relevant to success and failure in innovation performance.

MSDO/MDSO analysis aims to identify the main variables that explain the performance differences between two sets of cases with different performances. This is a preliminary stage in the implementation of the QCA method, especially when the variables studied are numerous, which limits the QCA analysis. In this analysis, cases are researches in Brazil and Spain. In Spain there are 8 cases, all successful, and in Brazil there are 18 cases, being 9 of success and 9 of failure. Success or Failure is the measure of Performance (outcome) and are represented by the numbers 1 (success) and 0 (failure).

The results showed the competitive resources contained in research and development organizations, with emphasis on the physical resource ´products and materials`, the organizational resource ´structure of organizations` and human resources ´learning` and ´management capacity` as determinants for innovation performance in agricultural research sector.

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