Business Excellence, Vol. 6 No. 2, 2012.
Preliminary communication
BUILDING THE INTANGIBLE CUBE: ASSESSMENT OF RELEVANT ORGANISATIONAL DIMENSIONS OF INTANGIBLE ASSETS
Eduardo Tome
; University of Lusíada de Famalicão, Vila Nova de Famalicão, Portugal
Miguel Gonzalez-Loureiro
; Faculty of Social Sciences and Communication and School of Forestry Engineering, Universidade de Vigo, Pontevedra, Spain
Abstract
In 2012 we live in the Era of the Intangible. Organizations have to rely more on Intangible Assets (IAs) than on tangible ones to prosper and even to survive. However, there is a big confusion among scholars and practitioners regarding the analysis of IAs. This confusion appears, we believe, because IAs are currently being analysed in too many different perspectives. And honestly, we think we all lack broad and background
perspective on all those analyses. The “Intangible Cube” we present provides precisely the background. The research question of this paper is: How many perspectives can we currently use in order to analyse the IAs (part 1 of the question), and how we can check if one perspective is more important than the other (part 2)?
In this context, we define six dimensions which we believe can address IAs. Knowledge Management refers to IA and its consequences in the Knowledge cycle; Intellectual Capital refers to IAs as mainly knowledge-based economic value, divided into Human Capital, Relational Capital and Structural Capital; Human Resource Development refers to IAs as organizational learning; Economics deals with the micro and macroeconomic consequences of IAs and with the market of IAs; Social Policy refers to IAs investment considered as a commodity which have social benefits and which are managed by social operators; and finally Management and Accountancy, in which we address the quite old
fashioned view according to which IAs are strategic resources that must be accounted for and valued for money.
The remaining question is: do organizations value them equally? We define and justify the six perspectives (addressing the fi rst part of the question). We also outline some examples of questions which will form a questionnaire we expect to conduct in 2012/13. The outcomes will provide an insight in the interest of organizations in each perspective. Finally, we will compare the obtained position with the expected one, to
address some key questions about why intangibles are still not widespread. We believe this paper addresses a new and decisive area in the field of intangible analysis, and of course in KM.
Keywords
Intangible Assets; Organizations; Value; Perspectives; Intangible management
Hrčak ID:
96829
URI
Publication date:
1.12.2012.
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