The future of intellectual capital

The concept and practice of intellectual capital as an approach to explain value creation in companies has a long history stretching back to the 1930s but it only gained prominence since the mid-1990s with the articles in Fortune by Stewart and the work of Edvinsson, then at Skandia. In the fifteen years since then the uptake of intellectual capital as a management system by industry has been dismal and stands in stark contrast to the uptake of systems such as the balanced scorecard and also stands in contrast to the volume of papers published on intellectual capital. This paper contends that there are two main reasons for this. The first is the continuing lack of a coherent central theory and hence consensus on the fundamental question of what intellectual capital is. The second is the lack of coherence and connectedness in the research in disciplines such as knowledge management which are associated with intellectual capital. Support for these assertions is provided by critical statistical and content analyses of the papers published in the Journal of Intellectual Capital since 2000 and other research both in detail and in general. The paper develops the analyses concentrating on ontology and taxonomy as fundamental areas and then analyses the patterns in publication approach and the breadth of the subject matter in the papers. These analyses are compared with an assessment of current business, governmental and societal needs. The paper continues with a personal analysis of the study results and concludes with a set of recommendations for the direction of future research and for a revision of the functions of international symposia on intellectual capital. Most important amongst the recommendations is the development of a central theory for intellectual capital to bind together the various strands of research and resolution of the ontological and taxonomical issues