The Temporal Micro-foundations of the Capacity to Integrate and Create Resources

Theory on dynamic capabilities (DCs) has long assumed that DCs evolve over time, that managers play a key role in their development, and that DCs enable firms to reconfigure resources to accomplish change. Yet the capacity to integrate and create resources in a continuous process is an understudied part of DCs – we do not sufficiently understand how and why nonmanagerial individuals turn resources that they bring into their organizations into DCs. Based on an extensive qualitative study of how researchers in universities reflected on the significance of their grants for themselves and their organizations, we found that researchers’ mobilization of temporal structures shaped their capacity to integrate and secure resources. Especially researchers’ future orientation was important for their extension of their resources into their organizations. Our findings advance theory on DCs by providing a process-based explanation for individuals’ contribution to development of DCs related particularly to integrating and sustaining resources.