Editorial
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JIC-09-2020-287 |
| Pages | 641-647 |
| Date | 10 August 2020 |
| Published date | 10 August 2020 |
| Author | Ahmed Bounfour,Hannu Piekkola,Carter Bloch |
| Subject Matter | Behavioural accounting,Organizational structure/dynamics,Information & knowledge management |
Editorial
Intellectual capital, firms’innovation growth and emerging value spaces
Over the past 15 years, intangibles have emerged as an important source of growth and
innovation. Several national and international institutions have emphasized their
importance: the OECD, the European Commission, the World Bank, METI in Japan and
BNDES in Brazil, among others (Bounfour and Miyagawa, 2015). According to the OECD
(OECD, 2013), knowledge-based capital accounts for 5–11% of GDP in most member
countries, and play a greater role in productivity growth than tangible capital. At the firm
level, the resource-based view (Barney, 1991;Wernerfelt, 1984) as well as the dynamic
capabilities approach (Bounfour, 2003;Teece et al., 1997;Teece, 2015) highlight the
heterogeneity of firms and the critical role of intangible assets for firm performance. The
intellectual capital of nations and regions has been developed recently as a subject for
research and action (Bounfour, 2008,2018). More generally, the intellectual capital literature
needs to be extended beyond the sphere of firms and individual organizations (Bounfour,
2009;Bounfour and Edvinsson, 2005).
However, despite this recognition, important analytical issues remain to be addressed,
notably modeling the contribution of intangibles to innovation as well as to productivity
growth –also in view of the low productivity growth in the EU area. Various additional
questions have also emerged that are related to new forms of organizations –especially
digital tools for cooperation and platforms, the critical role of data as intangible assets, and
the way firms can take advantage of such “new”assets in the design of their business models.
The lack of data availability at the firm level is a key barrier to further analysis of the role of
intangibles. Without micro data, we cannot distinguish between intangibles that create firm
appropriable investments and intangibles commons: the pool of knowledge, skills and
competencies aggregated at a technological, industrial or geographical level (Lampel et al.,
2020). The following issues are among those where we think progress still needs to be made,
both at the scientific, business and policy levels.
The issue of measurement and valuation
Work on the measurement of intellectual capital has focused on broadening the
conceptualization of what constitutes a capital investment, developing measures of
intangibles at the macro level and, more recently, at the micro level for individual firms.
Expenditure based methods developed by Corrado et al. (2005,2009) and the related Barnes
and McClure (2009) have also been influential in measuring intangibles and the effects of
intangibles on economic growth at the industry and national level. In the Innodrive
framework, a performance-based valuation has been also applied, where output elasticities of
intangible assets are compared to their output shares to revise their value (Piekkola, 2016).
Other attempts to estimate intangible assets are Cummins (2005) and Lev and
Radhakrishnan (2005).
Editorial
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The editors of this special issue are members in EU Horizon 2020 project Globalinto (2019–2022) which
seeks to measure and analyze new intangibles for European growth. At the industry-level, the project
relies primarily on newly established global value chain WIOD data. At the firm level, the measurement
of intangibles is based on innovation work related to management, marketing, R&D and information
and communication technology (ICT) work. GLOBALINTO builds on earlier work in the EU 7th
framework projects Innodrive and Coinvest, which developed new ways to measure intangibles in a
broad sense.
Journal of Intellectual Capital
Vol. 21 No. 5, 2020
pp. 641-647
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1469-1930
DOI 10.1108/JIC-09-2020-287
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