Invisible Resources and Their Accumulation for Corporate Growth

By Hiroyuki Itami
1983| Working Paper No. 682

The basic question behind this paper is deceptively simple: why can some firms continue to grow and some firms cannot even under very similar environmental conditions? What is the essential driving mechanism behind successful corporate growth? My thesis: it is accumulation of invisible resources. The paper tries (1) to identify invisible resources as strategically important for corporate growth, (2) to develop a framework to conceptualize them and (3) to analyze their accumulation process.