Resource Characteristics and Redeployment Strategies: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis

Firms pursue a number of redeployment strategies in order to achieve growth and create value for their stakeholders. While the majority of previous research focuses on how firms create synergic value by sharing resources across multiple business units, we lack a systematic analysis of the determinants of different redeployment strategies. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework that allows us to systematically investigate how intrinsic resource characteristics affect resource redeployment strategies. Our framework identifies four critical characteristics of resources, that is, fungibility, scale-free nature, decomposability, and tradability. We develop a number of predictions that provide guidance for researchers to identify the optimal resource redeployment strategy appropriate for resources with a certain set of characteristics.