Resources, Processes, and Values

Definition

Christensen's RPV framework holds that "three classes of factors affect what an organization can and cannot do: its resources, its processes, and its values." Resources — people, cash, technology, brands, relationships — are the most visible and the most transferable across organizations. Processes are the patterns of interaction, coordination, and decision-making by which resources get turned into products, whether formal, informal, or cultural; a process tuned to one task is, by the same tuning, inefficient at a different task. Values are the criteria employees use to decide what gets prioritized — including which projects are "big enough" or "profitable enough" to matter — and they harden as an organization grows, making low-margin or small-scale work harder to prioritize honestly over time.

In the Book

Chapter 8 builds this framework explicitly to explain the empirical pattern from chapters 5 through 7: the only firms that succeeded at commercializing disruptive technology were those that built independent organizations sized to the new opportunity. Christensen positions RPV as a sharper alternative to the vaguer "core competence" language popular at the time, arguing that identical people, given identical resources, will produce different results in different organizations because capability resides in an organization's processes and values, not merely its people — "processes are established so that employees perform recurrent tasks in a consistent way... this means that the very mechanisms through which organizations create value are intrinsically inimical to change."

Why It Matters

RPV explains why simply hiring the right people for a hard new task often still fails: the surrounding organization's processes and values — tuned by years of successfully serving its existing customers at existing margins — actively resist the new task even when no individual in it does. It gives a diagnostic for any capability question — is the constraint really in the people, or in the processes and values that will process them regardless — that applies wherever an established system is being asked to do something structurally different from what it was built to do well.