Intellectual Capital Assessment Practices: Overview and Managerial Implications

Structured Abstract

Purpose: Acknowledging the strategic relevance of assessing and managing Intellectual Capital (IC), this editorial first discusses a classification of the IC assessment strategies and second introduces the main topics investigated by the papers collected in this special issue. The notion of IC assessment strategy is interpreted as the set of economic and managerial decisions and purposes characterising the assessment of an organisation’s knowledge assets. It is argued that the definition of a knowledge asset assessment strategy has to take into account two dimensions: on the one hand, the nature of the managerial approach to be adopted for the assessment, distinguishing between “value management” and “value communication”; and on the other hand the most appropriate “evaluation architecture” to be used in order to gather and report the assessment information for control and decision making.

Design/methodology/approach – The approaches, evidences and insights discussed in this introduction result from the integration of the theory analysis with the insights extracted from the discussions that took place at the conference “International Forum on Knowledge Assets Dynamics” organized in June 2012 in Matera, Italy. At this leading international conference, experts discussed the importance of the Intellectual Capital for organizational business excellence in the 21st century business landscape, the new IC key-value drivers to focus on in order to face emergent competitive challenges, and the research and management practices most appropriate to address complexity, uncertainty and changes of today’s business landscape.

Originality/value – This editorial outline the key IC assessment strategies that organisations and practitioners should take into account when designing measurement systems aimed at gathering information to inform IC management actions.

Findings – Four IC assessment strategies are proposed addressing their relevance for management actions. This represents the background to introduce the main topics investigated by the papers that are collected in this special issue.

Paper type – Editorial