Required IT-Related Capabilities For The Utilization of New Opportunities in Creating Interorganizational Competitive Advantage

Developments in information technology (IT) are perceived to promote interorganizational cooperation within and across industry boundaries. IT-enabled cooperation has challenged the creation of interorganizational competitive advantages, as conceptualized in the Relational View (e.g., Dyer and Singh, 1998). The relationship between IT and the conversion of inter-firm value-creating opportunities into interorganizational competitive advantage is still unclear. In this paper, we have developed a conceptual framework regarding the relationship between IT and interorganizational resource complementarity, which is an important determinant of interorganizational competitive advantage. Our analysis suggests that cooperating organizations need to develop three distinctive but interrelated capabilities in order to effectuate interorganizational resource complementarity with regard to IT. We propose that these capabilities form a pre-condition for achieving interorganizational competitive advantage by means of IT-enabled interorganizational relationships. Preliminary support for our framework and proposition is provided by a case study of an interorganizational relationship between a large European financial services firm and a major European telecommunication firm.