New Paradigm: Resource-Based Theory
The currently dominant view of business strategy - resource-based theory - is based on the concept of economic rent and the view of the company as a collection of capabilities. This view of strategy has a coherence and integrative role that places it well ahead of other mechanisms of strategic decision making.
Traditional strategy models, such as Michael Porter's five forces model, focus on the company's external competitive environment. Most of them do not attempt to look inside the company. In contrast, the resource-based perspective highlights the need for a fit between the external market context in which a company operates and its internal capabilities.

In contrast to the Input / Output Model (I/O model), the resource-based view is grounded in the perspective that a firm's internal environment, in terms of its resources and capabilities, is more critical to the determination of strategic action than is the external environment. "Instead of focusing on the accumulation of resources necessary to implement the strategy dictated by conditions and constraints in the external environment (I/O model), the resource-based view suggests that a firm's unique resources and capabilities provide the basis for a strategy. The strategy chosen should allow the firm to best exploit its core competencies relative to opportunities in the external environment".

Sustainable Competitive Advantage
According to this view, a company's competitive advantage derives from its ability to assemble and exploit an appropriate combination of resources. Sustainable competitive advantage is achieved by continuously developing existing and creating new resources and capabilities in response to rapidly changing market conditions.

Creating Economic Rent
The resource based view of strategy emphasizes economic rent creation through distinctive capabilities. Economic rent is what companies earn over and above the cost  of the capital employed in their business. It is the measure of the competitive advantage, and competitive advantage is the only means by which companies in competitive markets can earn economic rent. The objective of a company is to increase its economic rent, rather than its profit as such. "A company which increases its profits but not its economic rent - as through investments or acquisitions which yield less than the cost of capital - destroys value".4 The perspective of economic rent forces the question 'why can't competitors do that?' into discussion.

Resources and Capabilities
Each organization is a collection of unique resources and capabilities that provides the basis for its strategy and the primary source of its returns. In the 21st-century hyper-competitive landscape, a firm is a collection of evolving capabilities that is managed dynamically in pursuit of above-average returns4. Thus, differences in firm's performances across time are driven primarily by their unique resources and capabilities rather than by an industry's structural characteristics.

Resources are inputs into a firm's production process, such as capital, equipment, the skills of individual employees, patents, finance, and talented managers. Resources are either tangible or intangible in nature. With increasing effectiveness, the set of resources available to the firm tends to become larger.5 Individual resources may not yield to a competitive advantage. It is through the synergistic combination and integration of sets of resources that competitive advantages are formed.

A capability is the capacity for a set of resources to integratively perform a stretch task or an activity. Through continued use, capabilities become stronger and more difficult for competitors to understand and imitate. As a source of competitive advantage, a capability "should be neither so simple that it is highly imitable, nor so complex that it defies internal steering and control."