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Even today still many business process change (BPC) initiatives fail and cause high overruns for organizations undergoing BPC initiatives. It is therefore important that BPC practitioners and researchers understand the risks inherent in BPC projects, and that they adapt their risk management processes to account for and mitigate these risks. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate which emergent risks matter in BPC project.

The authors adopted case survey methodology and investigated data from 130 case studies to show the nature and magnitude of relationships between organizational support risks, volatility risks, and BPC project and process performance.

The results show that organizational support risks influence both the overall BPC project performance and process performance. Whereas, volatility risks influence project performance but appear to have no direct impact on the process performance. Both organizational support risks and volatility risks show influence on project management practices.

The study show several limitations that might be assigned to the case survey methodology, such as use of secondary data or publication bias.

The authors provide considerable support which emergent risks matter in BPC projects.

The contribution of this study takes several forms. It fills a gap in the literature concerning emergent risk factors inherent in BPC projects. The authors provided theoretical explanation of the effects of emergent risks on BPC project and process performance. And lastly, the authors have demonstrated the usefulness of case survey methodology in BPC research.

The purpose of this paper is to refine the resource-based theory of the firm. It intends to deal with key theoretical issues affecting the development of a model that empirically captures the relevance of knowledge to performance. The research task is not only to look inside the firm in search of candidates for a strategic resource, but also to better understand how a resource becomes strategic as the consequence of specific attributes. This approach has the potential of providing a relevant insight into the characteristics that resources must possess as well as a more effective way to compare their relative relevance to competitive advantage.

Hypotheses are tested by a comprehensive panel data of 29 AIDS/HIV drugs from 1997 to 2010, covering the performance trajectory of more than 90 percent of all branded products in this segment.

Based on the VRIO framework (Barney 1991, 2001a), which asserts that resources need to be valuable, rare, inimitable, and difficult to organize in order to become a source of sustainable competitive advantage, the paper derives seven empirical constructs of technological knowledge. Five of these constructs are statistically significant, explaining up to 36 percent of the variance in sales outcomes. Results show that the most important resource attributes are value and organizational capabilities. Inimitability is partially relevant, but rarity is not.

Results suggest that the best way to generate competitive advantage is through continuous improvement of technological knowledge. This conclusion shows that knowledge heterogeneity is more strategically relevant to performance than knowledge immobility.

Differently from previous papers, instead of measuring how much a resource (or its accumulated stock) influences competitive advantage, this paper identifies and measures the attributes through which the resource matters to market outcomes. It is not the resource itself, but its strategic attributes which actually generate differential benefits to firms.