Intellectual Capital, visualizing and developing

Executive summary Problems During the last decades the society has undergone a major change. Only some years ago organizations’ most important assets were of financial character. Some years ago the conception intellectual capital were presented in order to further explain the difference between market value and book value. This difference is a major concern for many organizations, and to solve this problem, methods of how organizations should visualize its intellectual capital is needed. The visualizing of intellectual capital is important but more important is how organizations can gain future success of its intellectual capital. Organizations need to find out what aspects or elements that influence their possibility to develop its intellectual capital. . Purpose The purpose of this thesis is to illustrate how intellectual capital can be visualized and give a comprehensive view of elements that influence the development of intellectual capital. Methodology The methodology of this thesis is of qualitative nature, and founded of interviews within four different organizations as well as literary studies concerning the subject intellectual capital. Conclusions Visualization of intellectual capital could be further explained by separating the major benefits of visualization into the two parts, internal and external. Internal visualization could effectively be conducted by a Scorecard or an EFQM model. These models works efficiently in order to visualize intellectual capital. The aim of the visualization should be external where an intellectual capital statement should be created. The external visualization will enable learning, which is an important tool to secure sustainable competitiveness. The most essential part of intellectual capital is human capital or human knowledge. Human capital alone is not sufficient to the development of intellectual capital. It is rather the surrounding within the individuals’ work that has a vital importance of organizations capacity to develop intellectual capital. Six important elements have been identified that affect the development of intellectual capital. The elements are not separable since one element alone do not explain the development of intellectual capital. All six elements are correlated to each other and together they leverage the development of intellectual capital. Three elements, Human Resource principles, knowledge transition and knowledge management, are viewed as requirements for the development to occur. More important are the supporting elements, motivation, organisation culture and structure, where structure today is undergoing changes. In order to sustain competitive organisations need to understand the importance of more virtual organizations or network constellation, which develop intellectual capital effectively. Key words Intellectual capital, structural capital, visualization, knowledge and development