82 PART II CHAPTER 3 The role of the brand in brand-driven innovation < The brand as resource 3.2 The brand as resource In brand-driven innovation, the brand is envisioned as a resource: it is not an end in itself, but it is a means towards that end. It's not the result of a process but is rather an input to a process. Strategy literature tells us that resources comprise the tangible (such as raw materials and machines), the intangible (such as intellectual property) and human assets (such as the skills and general know-how) of an organisation (Grant, 2002). In BDI, the brand is the intangible resource that drives innovation (see figure 1, below). It can do this in three ways: 1 | It can be a source of inspiration: ideas for new products or services can be derived from it. It can even inspire the entry of new markets, the creation of a new business model, the formation of partnerships or the acquisition For the brand, this means that it has to be unique (a generic brand is not rare); it has to be based on unique insights (which makes it imperfectly imitable); and it has to be connected to the organisation itself (which makes it non-substitutable). That a resource has to be rare in order to be valuable does not also mean that it should be rare within the organisation. On the contrary: computer chips are expensive because they require gold and very complex machines to be made ­ both gold and very complex machines are hard to obtain, being rare, and thus are valuable resources. But in the manufacturing processes of a chip manufacturer such as Intel, these machines, and the gold, should not be rare at all: they should be readily available, in suffi cient capacities and quantities to allow for an uninterrupted manufacturing process.