Intellectual capital and knowledge generation: an empirical study from Colombian public universities
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JIC-09-2019-0223 |
| Pages | 1053-1084 |
| Published date | 09 June 2020 |
| Date | 09 June 2020 |
| Author | John Salinas-Ávila,René Abreu-Ledón,Johnny Tamayo-Arias |
| Subject Matter | Knowledge management,Accounting/accountancy,Accounting & Finance,Information & knowledge management,Organizational structure/dynamics,Behavioural accounting |
Intellectual capital and knowledge
generation: an empirical study
from Colombian public universities
John Salinas-
Avila
Department of Econom
ıa y Administraci
on, Universidad de Caldas,
Manizales, Colombia and
Department of Administraci
on, Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Manizales,
Manizales, Colombia
Ren
e Abreu-Led
on
Department of Industrial Engineering, Universidad Central Marta Abreu de las Villas,
Villa Clara, Cuba, and
Johnny Tamayo-Arias
Department of Industrial Engineering,
Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Manizales, Manizales, Colombia
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the relationships between the
dimensions of intellectual capital (IC) and the generation of knowledge in public universities.
Design/methodology/approach–An online survey was developed and administered in Colombia. A total of
209 researchers participated in the study. Data were collected through IC measurements concerning the
research mission of the universities. Scientific publications from the respondents and the citations received
were taken as proxies for the generation of knowledge. To test the hypotheses, structural equation modeling
was used.
Findings –Hypotheses proposing a positive association between the dimensions of IC, namely, human capital,
structural capital, and relational capital, and the generation of knowledge were tested. The findings highlight
that human capital is indirectly and positively related to the generation of knowledge through relational capital,
as well as through the path of structural capital-relational capital.
Practical implications –The study suggests that directors of research at universities could improve the
results of this activity by analyzing and understanding the dimensions of IC that contribute to the development
of scientific capacities and the generation of knowledge.
Originality/value –This is one of the first studies that has examined the interrelationships between the
dimensions of IC at universities and the generation of knowledge.
Keywords Intellectual capital, Higher education, Research, Colombian public universities, University
performance
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
A knowledge-based economy is characterized by the growing importance of the creation,
diffusion and practical use of knowledge for the efficiency of economic systems (OECD, 1996;
White et al., 2013;Strozek, 2014). In this context, systems of higher education play a key role,
as they are responsible for the transfer of knowledge and the formation of the human capital
necessary for innovation and R&D, which must be closely linked to industries’need to
facilitate economic development (Nguyen and Pham, 2011). These new competitive
environments are pushing higher education institutions to expand their academic results
Intellectual
capital and
knowledge
generation
1053
The authors would like to thank Editage (www.editage.com) for English language editing.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/1469-1930.htm
Received 15 September 2019
Revised 23 December 2019
18 March 2020
Accepted 7 May 2020
Journal of Intellectual Capital
Vol. 21 No. 6, 2020
pp. 1053-1084
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1469-1930
DOI 10.1108/JIC-09-2019-0223
amid financial constraints and calls for greater accountability (OECD, 2008,2013;Singh,
2013;Esposito et al., 2013;Berman and Paradeise, 2016). In particular, Colombian universities
that traditionally have had an emphasis on teaching show in the last decades an orientation to
and strengthening of their research mission (OECD, 2012,2016;OCyT, 2016;RICYT, 2017).
Following this perspective, intellectual capital (IC) has been considered a valuable tool to
improve the internal management of universities because it allows for the identification of
strengths and weaknesses regarding research activities (S
anchez and Elena, 2006;Ca~
nibano
and S
anchez, 2008;Ram
ırez, 2013;Ram
ırez and Tejada, 2013) and contributes to assessing
the alignment between strategic orientation and performance (Secundo et al., 2010). In other
words, from the conceptual framework of IC, it is possible to account for capacities and
weaknesses in the management of the intangible assets of universities.
Likewise, a large part of IC research within the public sector has focused on state
universities (Dumay et al., 2015;Guthrie and Dumay, 2015;Samkin and Schneider, 2017), with
studies in various countries such as Denmark (Hellstr€
om and Husted, 2004), New Zealand
(Low et al., 2015), Austria (Leitner, 2004;S
anchez et al., 2009;Habersam et al., 2013,2018),
Spain (S
anchez and Elena, 2006;Ca
~
nibano and S
anchez, 2009; Ram
ırez, 2010;Ram
ırez et al.,
2017;de Frutos-Beliz
on et al., 2019), South Africa (Veltri and Silvestri, 2015), Portugal (Pedro
et al., 2019), Italy (Secundo et al., 2010;Di Berardino and Corsi, 2018;Mariani et al., 2018), the
United Kingdom (Bezhani, 2010) and Colombia (S
anchez-Torres and Rivera, 2009;Cricelli
et al., 2018). Also, a recent review of IC literature on education has provided evidence of
growing academic interest in this area as a relevant field of research (Bisogno et al., 2018).
However, considering only empirical studies as a research focus, IC literature in
universities is still limited (see e.g. Mart
ınez-Torres, 2006;Feng et al., 2012;Mumtaz and
Abbas, 2014;Mercado-Salgado, 2016;Cricelli et al., 2018;de Frutos-Beliz
on et al., 2019).
Therefore, additional efforts are needed to obtain a better understanding of how IC
dimensions (human capital, structural capital and relational capital) are combined and
complemented to achieve results in the research mission and the generation of knowledge.
First, this study contributes to addressing this gap by exploring the nature of the relationship
between IC dimensions. Second, the article highlights the effect of these dimensions on the
generation of knowledge. Third, this study is novel in that it develops a survey to measure IC
in the Colombian context, which is underrepresented in current research (see e.g. Dumay et al.,
2015), and selects researchers affiliated with public universities where the research will be
carried out.
This paper is organized as follows. The second section presents five key aspects: the
literature review, conceptual framework of IC in universities, measurement of the knowledge
generation construct, Colombia’s profile in science, technology, and innovation, and
hypotheses development. Section three describes the methodology and the sample. The
fourth section reports the results of the evaluation of the measurement model and the
adjustment of the structural model. Finally, the analysis of the results, conclusions, and
theoretical and practical implications are presented in the fifth section.
2. Framework and hypotheses
2.1 Literature review
Four stages of IC research have been identified. The first was carried out before the mid-1990s
and is characterized by efforts to raise awareness about the importance of IC management for
the development of a sustainable competitive advantage (Petty and Guthrie, 2000;Serenko
and Bontis, 2013;Rooney and Dumay, 2016). This stage is also distinguished by attempts to
create norms and standards for its measurement, although without an empirical research
base (Guthrie et al., 2012). The second stage of IC research emerged in the late 1990s, aiming to
gain recognition as an academic discipline (Petty and Guthrie, 2000;Serenko and Bontis,
JIC
21,6
1054
2013). Dumay and Garanina (2013) find that different models were established during this
phase, which sought to promote IC management practices that would improve their
dissemination and increase the competitiveness of companies (Montemary and Chiucchi,
2017). The third stage arose in 2004 (Chatzkel, 2004;Alcaniz et al., 2011;Guthrie et al., 2012;
Dumay, 2013) and is characterized by the evaluation of the concept in the praxis and oriented
to the study of the business implications of measurement (Giuliani et al., 2016), that is, how
theory connects with practice (Mouritsen, 2006). Likewise, a continuous increase in empirical
work is highlighted compared to normative approaches (Guthrie et al., 2012;Dumay, 2013;
Pedro et al., 2018). Currently, complementary to the previous stage, there is a call to examine
the fourth stage of IC research, which is based on ecosystems of cities and nations (Dumay,
2013;Dameri and Ricciardi, 2015;Secundo et al., 2016). It should be added that, for some
authors, all stages remain in the development phase (Dumay et al., 2017;Pedro et al., 2018).
However, Mouritsen (2006) offers a useful distinction between two approaches that are
used to address the study of IC: ostensive and performative. The ostensive approach is a
causal-predictive model in which the elements of IC predict value creation, whereas the
performative approach examines practices within organizations. The call by leading authors
in the IC field is to develop further research from a performative perspective, which is related
to the third stage of IC research (Mouritsen, 2006;Guthrie et al., 2012;Dumay and Garanina,
2013), although without discarding the possibility of carrying out ostensive research that
examines new approaches (Dumay, 2013). In this regard, the exploration of the relationships
between the dimensions of IC and the influence on the performance of organizations remains
an important issue that deserves further investigation (Wang and Chang, 2005;St-Pierre and
Audet, 2011;Kim et al., 2012), taking into account that there is broad consensus in the
literature on the importance and positive impact of IC on the performance of organizations/
regions/countries (Pedro et al., 2018). Consequently, from a third stage research perspective
but under an ostensive approach, the present work focuses on the study of IC related to the
research mission of universities, identifying and exploring the interrelationships between the
dimensions of this construct and its effect on the generation of scientific knowledge.
Various empirical studies analyze the link between IC and the performance of scientific
activities in universities (Bueno et al., 2003;Palumbo and Di Berardino, 2012;Nava-Rogel and
Mercado-Salgado, 2011;Feng et al., 2012;Maltseva et al., 2018) and of the development and
validation of IC measurement scales (Mercado-Salgado, 2016) associated with academic
research (de Frutos-Beliz
on et al., 2019). In Colombia, S
anchez-Torres and Rivera (2009)
present a conceptual model of IC for measuring research capabilities based on the results
obtained from the construction of a system of indicators. Bucheli et al. (2012) examine the
influence of key factors that could explain the growth of knowledge production in Colombian
universities (2003–2009), which are related to a successive process of IC accumulation. Along
the same lines, Cricelli et al. (2018) explore, based on the collection of secondary data, the
relationship between IC and the performance of Colombian public universities. The authors
emphasize that universities with stronger IC obtain outstanding R&D results. However,
studies that use structural models to investigate the interrelationships between the
dimensions of IC and university performance are still limited. Mart
ınez-Torres (2006)
observes a positive effect between the dimensions of IC (human, structural and relational
capital), constituting these relationships as links that show how the model feeds back. This
study was carried out in the Department of Socio-Legal Studies of the University of Seville.
Mumtaz and Abbas (2014) confirm a significant effect of the dimensions of human, structural,
and relational capital (IC) on the performance of private universities in Pakistan. Also, Feng
et al. (2012) explore the interrelations of IC in Taiwan universities and their effect on research
results and technology transfer performance. In sum, most of the empirical research has
focused on the impact of a series of potentially relevant factors that affect the relationship
between IC elements and research results in universities; however, the interrelationships
Intellectual
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