Jay Barney

Jay Barney is a strategic management scholar and presidential professor at the University of Utah. His research examines how differences in firms’ resources and capabilities can contribute to sustained competitive advantage.

In his 1991 article, “Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage,” Barney discusses value, rarity, difficulty of imitation, and substitutability as indicators of a resource’s potential to support a sustained advantage. The distinction matters when assessing a company’s strengths: doing something well is not enough if competitors can readily match it or meet the same customer need another way. His resource-based analysis adds a test of defensibility to the question of how a company puts its capabilities to work.