International Business Class:

Conduct a VRIO analysis of your business school relative to the top three rival schools in terms of (1) perceived reputation (such as rankings), (2) faculty strength, (3) student quality, (4) administrative efficiency, (5) IT, and (6) building maintenance.

If you were the dean and had a limited budget, where would you invest precious financial resources to make your school number one among rivals? Why?

The VRIO framework provides a means of determining whether a particular resource can produce competitive advantage for a firm. It focuses on the value (V), rarity (R), imitability (I), and organizational (O) aspects of resources and capabilities.

Only valuable, rare, and hard-to-imitate capabilities that are organizationally embedded and exploited can lead to sustained competitive advantage and persistently above-average performance.

Because capabilities cannot be evaluated in isolation, the VRIO framework presents four interconnected and increasingly difficult hurdles. In other words, these four V, R, I, and O aspects come together as one "package."