Ryanair VRIO Case Study
Key Learning Outcomes
By the end of the case, students should be able to:
- Understand how dynamic resources and capabilities can play a role in corporate success.
- Examine how the resources and capabilities of Ryanair have contributed to the competitive advantage of Ryanair post covid .
- Be able to apply strategy frameworks such as VRIO to real company cases.
Assignment question
Using a Vrio/Vrin framework, analyse Ryanair's distinctive resources and capabilities to determine the organisation's competitive advantage and critically evaluate the VRIO framework and discuss which other model or framework could be associated to VRIO to overcome its limitations.
1.0 INTRODUCTION
The resource based view of the firm helps managers of organizations to assess whether their firms have built up strategic resources and capabilities that are valuable, rare and inimitable in order to attain and sustain competitive advantage.
The potential for a resource to sustain competitive advantage depends on possession of four attributes; it must be valuable (V), rare (R), imperfectly imitable (I), and organization (O) also known as VRIO. Resources that do not have all four qualities can still be very useful, but are unlikely to provide long-term advantages. VRIO/ VRIN will thus help you analyze your company’s resources/capabilities and determine whether the company has enough unique resources and capabilities that are Valuable, Rare, Inimitable and Non-substitutable to provide profitable and sustained competitive advantage. Resources and capabilities often come from SWOT too.
Using VRIO, this report examines the key tangible and intangible resources of Ryanair as well as an assessment of its core capabilities. These are reviewed and assessed against the VRIO framework which assesses their value, rarity, inimitability and organization (see figure 1).