Hans Christopher D.

Sanchez

MA2

CLASS PARTICIPATIO/QUIZ

Can companies share business secrets among themselves and still consider each
other as competitors? Why or why not?

No. Since exchanging business secrets with each other would make them lose the
long-term competitive advantage they could have acquired if they did not exchange
information to one another. According to the VRIO framework, a resource or
capability should be valuable, rare, inimitable, and organized to develop a sustained
competitive advantage, and if companies were to share their business secrets it
would lessen the value and uniqueness of their resource or capability since the other
business can now copy what the other does to maximize the value of their firm.
Exchanging sensitive business information/strategies may limit both organizations'
capacity to compete, and if they do, they are more accurately classified as associates
rather than competitors.