Ingemar Dierickx

Ingemar Dierickx is a strategy researcher and negotiation adviser who formerly taught at INSEAD. With Karel Cool, he wrote the 1989 Management Science paper “Asset Stock Accumulation and Sustainability of Competitive Advantage.”

The paper distinguishes resources a company can purchase from assets it must build over time. It examines why the path of accumulation can make some assets difficult to imitate: speeding up investment may not reproduce years of development, existing assets may help build new ones, and interconnected assets may be hard to recreate separately. Dierickx and Cool also account for erosion and substitution, so their argument is not that every accumulated capability lasts. For OutcomesLab’s article, their contribution explains why repeated investment can matter without treating spending or elapsed time alone as proof of advantage.