Guest editorial
| Date | 25 February 2021 |
| Pages | 213-218 |
| Published date | 25 February 2021 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JIC-03-2021-304 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Knowledge management,HR & organizational behaviour,Organizational structure/dynamics,Accounting & finance,Accounting/accountancy,Behavioural accounting |
| Author | Francesco Schiavone,Alberto Ferraris,Samuel Fosso Wamba,Sanjay Kumar Singh |
Guest editorial
Intellectual capital in healthcare
Intellectual capital (IC) is a crucial asset for healthcare companies. Indeed, they usually have
access to large structured and unstructured elements of formal and informal know-how
distributedacross, for instance, knowledge of users thatreside in databases or reports and/or
embedded in the culture of organizations themselves(Pir ozzi and Ferulano, 2016). Nowadays,
information and communication technologies (ICTs) in healthcare, such as radio frequency
identification (Anand and Fosso Wamba, 2013), Internet of things(IoT) (Papa et al., 2018)orbig
data analytics (Wanget al., 2018), may more than ever before enablehealthcare organizations to
deliverhigh quality servicesto their stakeholdersas well as create new and more effectivedata-
driven businessmodels, increasingtheir performance (Fosso Wamba et al.,2017;Ferraris et al.,
2018;Singh and El-Kassar, 2019;Schiavone et al., 2020). The rise of new technologies in
healthcare generated different types of knowledge and pushed innovative business models.
Theyare often appliedby healthcare organizationsin globalmarkets to managesuccessfullythe
multiple stakeholders participating to such complex industry (e.g. physicians, policymakers,
payers and patients) (Elton and O’Riordan,2016).
As a consequence, recent studies attested the importance on the organizational aspects
related to the management of innovation and IC in healthcare (Evans et al., 2015;Wang and
Byrd, 2017) as well as related practices and tools to manage intra- and interorganizational
knowledge (Del Giudice and Maggioni, 2014;Wang and Byrd, 2017), especially regarding the
creation, sharing, storage and use of relevant knowledge resources (Mazzotta, 2018;Santoro
et al.,2018)and design and effectiveness of smartmedical wearables (Papa et al.,2018).Evans
et al. (2015) conceptualized IC of healthcare organizations as a mix of intangible resources,
coupled with the value derived from internal capabilities and external relationships. Other
studiessupport managers’perspectivein incorporatingflexibility in decision-making(Dortland
et al.,2014). Indeed, the consequence of health context restructuring saw the emergence of
activity of decentralization and the splitting of decision-making power. Thus, in order to
maximize the effectiveness of knowledge transfer strategies at thenational, regional and local
levels, healthcareorganizations have to develop structures,activities and processes thatallow
the creationof a valid and convincing valueproposition for all the stakeholdersinvolved (Peng
et al., 2007;Evans et al.,2015).Measuring and disclosing IC as well as comparingthe value and
the IC strategyin different time frames or withsimilar companies operatingin the same sector
allowsproviding the quantitativebasis for moreobjective quantificationof the useful indicators
for an economic a ssessment purpose (Petty and Guthrie, 2000;Maditinos et al.,2011;Gi acosa
et al.,2017).
Drawing on these assumptions, and after our editorial work as guest editors, we can argue
IC nowadays in healthcare is a research topic able to integrate and make closer many
scientific domains and perspectives, as reported in Figure 1, such integrated reporting,
disclosure, international management, digital transformation and data intelligence, value
creation and sustainability, strategy and innovation.
This specialissue comprises nine papersin addition to the current editorial.The first one is
entitled “Knowledge and Intellectual Capital in Internationalizing SMEs, case Study in
Technology-BasedHealthCompanies”.Zakeryetal. (2021) grounded theiranalysis in the health
industry in anemerging country: the Iranian advanced medical equipmentcompanies. Within
this context, the authors merge existing literature about internationalization knowledge
configurationand IC by improving our understanding of small andmedium-sized enterprises
(SMEs)internationalizationfrom developingmarkets. The IC perspectiveis useful for analysing
Guest editorial
213
Journal of Intellectual Capital
Vol. 22 No. 2, 2021
pp. 213-218
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1469-1930
DOI 10.1108/JIC-03-2021-304
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