Assessing resources and dynamic capabilities to implement the “Green Campus” project

“Green Campus”is a project developed by Politecnico di Bari, an Italiantechnical university, interested to start a“journey”towards sustainability. Thispaper illustrates the Green Campus project through the lens of two organiza-tional theories, i.e. the resource-based view (RBV) and the dynamic capabilitiestheory (DCT). RBV is adopted to present the specific resources owned byPolitecnico di Bari and analyze their usefulness for developing the project. DCTis used to describe the capabilities which Politecnico di Bari should leverage onto integrate, build, and reconfigure resources in order to meet the challenges ofsustainability and actually implement the project. To the authors’knowledge,neither RBV nor DCT have been still used to study organizations different fromfirms. The novelfield of application of these theories is an interesting insight ofthe paper. Moreover, this study contributes to give a theoretical foundation to thetopic of sustainable university, so covering a lack of the extant literature. Finally,it suggests specific directions in terms of resources and capabilities that universities need to commit to a sustainable future through the creation of agreen campus.