Strategic Aspects of Asset Management: An Overview of Current Research

Elizaveta Gavrikova,Yegor Burda,Irina Volkova

doi:10.3390/su12155955

Elizaveta Gavrikova, Yegor Burda + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su12155955

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Abstract

Major shifts in the competitive environment encouraged a recent growth in the number of academic articles devoted to strategic aspects of asset management. Organizations start to recognize that a strategic approach to asset management becomes a source of sustainable competitive advantages and long-term survival in the turbulent environment. However, existing studies are largely case-specific in interpreting strategy and draw on various theoretical grounds and approaches. This leads to little theoretical and methodological consistency in understanding current findings and how to design future studies. The key goal of this paper is to systematically review the existing research through the analysis of over 700 articles devoted to asset management with a focus on strategic aspects. Our key contributions are positioning strategic asset management within the vast field of asset management research, describing the nature of strategic asset management research, and confirming that asset management strategies align with different levels of organizational strategy. We visualize the existing research field, and indicate gaps and underdeveloped areas of research. We also shortly outline future research directions based on our findings, thus encouraging a more coherent development of research on strategic asset management.

Highlights

There has been a significant amount of interest in research on strategic asset management both in academia and industry [1,2,3,4], while the majority of existing research is devoted to general, not strategic aspects of asset management (e.g., [2,4])
Since multidisciplinary competence seems to be a source of sustainable competitive advantages, we argue that strategic management literature provides well-established approaches that can serve as a basis for analyzing asset management strategies
Through conducting a systematic literature review, we demonstrated that strategic asset management is an important, while still underdeveloped, area of research that received increased attention in recent years due to numerous factors challenging asset-intensive businesses

Summary

Introduction

There has been a significant amount of interest in research on strategic asset management both in academia and industry [1,2,3,4], while the majority of existing research is devoted to general, not strategic aspects of asset management (e.g., [2,4]). Generally physical asset management did not imply special education or professional knowledge and various approaches were evolving including maintenance, logistics, engineering, etc. Such an approach did not address the rising pressures from the external environment and claims of various stakeholders. The need for asset management as a recognized discipline emerged due to the increasing complexity of technical nature across a wide range of industries and organizations [7]. Asset management was widely accepted in capital intensive industries and infrastructure organizations [8]

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