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In the knowledge economy, the value of corporations, organizations and individuals is directly related to their knowledge and intellectual capital. This does not only apply to organizations in the private or public sector but also to entire nations. If intangibles and intellectual capital are important to organizations, they are also important to the productivity and competitiveness of nations as a whole. The question we try to answer is how can we better understand the dynamics of intangibles on a national scale?

The purpose of the current study is to illustrate the importance of strategic agility (SA), the capacity to respond agilely to a rapidly changing environment, for digitally transforming firms during the COVID-19 crisis. A secondary purpose of the study is to conceptually frame SA as a function of the creative to realized intangible capital (IC) ratio.

To inferentially corroborate the hypothesis, this study exploits the results of a recent firm-level survey, conducted under the H2020 project GlobalInto (2021). Via OLS and ordered logistic regressions, the relationship among SA, economic performance and IC was tested.

The exploratory findings implied that the more strategically agile companies were those that responded more effectively to the pandemic crisis, but only if they were ahead in terms of digital transformation. Moreover, the results implied that firms that were able to efficiently convert their creative IC into realized IC were the most strategically agile.

This study developed a new conceptual framework for digitally transforming firms that included the role of SA and the IC conversion ratio in the context of extreme threats to the survival of firms. Some preliminary practical recommendations were offered to management about how to measure the IC conversion ratio as well as how to stimulate and reward greater creativity among employees, filling a notable gap in the SA literature that provides less than precise guidance about how this concept can be measured.

Mobile phones are radically transforming micro-finance in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Kenya, in particular. The introduction of the micro-financial transaction mobile phone application, “MPesa,” created a means to facilitate micro-transactions without the need for an intermediary, such as a banking system. The purpose of this paper is to posit an econophysics model to predict the value of Mpesa for Kenyan and South African consumers. The econophysics framework posits several fitness matrices and a distance measure that can account for the concepts of mass, distance, momentum, velocity, action, and force. The authors begin with a table of the match between the physics concepts and the economic concepts followed by the vector model that utilizes these concepts for the MPesa application case. In this paper, the authors will argue that MPesa succeeded in Sub-Saharan African countries, such as Kenya, because the fit between what this group of customers needed and the solutions Safaricom’s MPesa offered was a better fit with a smaller distance to adoption than in the South African case.

The research develops an econophysics approach to the assessment of micro-finance development in Sub-Saharan countries.

The research shows clearly the reasons of the success of MPesa in Kenya in comparison of its relative failure in South Africa: the distance between customers’ expectations and the system supply.

The research is limited to two case studies and needs to be extended to other contexts, in order to demonstrate its robustness, especially with regard to the intangible dimension, e.g., the distance between a system potential and what it really offers.

The research shows the importance of system’s characteristics in its success.

The social implications are very high, especially in this case, where micro-finance is a high stake for developing societies.

This is one of the first works to develop an econophysics approach for the evaluation of the key characteristics of a system.

The paper aims to address the organizational transformation of firms for value creation resulting from cloud computing (CC).

With reference to the theory of organizational fit, we modeled organizational transformation as a function of five aspects of CC practice: functionality, data management, roles and competences of information technology services, control and organizational culture. The output variable was tested against a set of input variables defined with reference to the technology–organization–environment (TOE) and technology acceptance model (TAM). Based on a sample of 487 companies in seven countries in Europe, Asia, and the United States, the authors distinguished two groups of firms: transformational and hyper transformational.

The results highlight the key factors that determine whether a firm falls into one of these two groups, and include perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, complexity and compatibility of CC technology, and adequacy of resources. Top management support and government policy are found to only play a role for the transformational group while, surprisingly, vendor support had no impact for either group.

This research contributes to the literature on the role of digital transformation in value creation and on digitization of firms and organizational design, notably by considering the contribution of CC to the organizational dimension. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to make the link between TOE and TAM models and organizational fit theory, thereby going beyond the general approach to adoption found in information system research.

The paper aims at creating understanding on the dynamics of intellectual capital (IC), which has emerged recently as one of the major issues on the research agenda. The theme is studied from a national point of view.

The analysis has been conducted using data from the IMD Competitiveness Report covering the data of 51 countries from the years 2000‐2005. Data analysis is aimed at analysing time dependent relationships between intellectual capital and GNP growth. The research provides parameters of four types of effects for a nation's GNP growth: sustaining effects, boosting effects, linear growth potential and exponential growth potential. Based on the developmental stage of the countries they were grouped to: developing; transitional; and developed countries, and the effects of IC was studied within and between these groups.

The analysis specifies the types of IC factors that have important effects on economic growth on different level of economics. The analysis also provides an analytical framework for designing the context in which IC of nations can be adequately considered in the mid‐long term perspective.

The research has to be considered as exploratory. It has been conducted using only one database with certain limitations. Further research is needed especially by integrating other components of intellectual capital, e.g. reputation, decision‐making processes, and cultural dimension.

From a practical perspective the findings also provide important guidelines and framework for policy makers.

This paper provides a new view on the dynamics of IC at national level by relating IC ingredients to economic performance and specifying under which circumstances IC has important effects on national GNP growth.

Over the last five years several frameworks have been suggested for the development of corporate' competitive advantage, on the basis of their intangible resources. These frameworks are mainly managerially oriented; they require the design of a set of metrics dealing with organisational inputs. Hence the importance of making the link between internal and external perspectives, especially those related to financial performance. Making such a link is the main aim of the intellectual capital dynamic value (IC‐dVAL®) approach, which integrates four dimensions for measurement – inputs, processes, assets, and outputs – and defines ad hoc metrics for measuring intellectual capital in a dynamic way. This approach is now used at the corporate level in several contexts. It is also under consideration for implementation at the mesoeconomic and even the macroeconomic levels. The paper also presents how such an approach can be used at the country level, especially in Europe.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relevance of intellectual capital (IC) as a strategic resource and source of regional value creation dynamics. Adopting a knowledge‐based approach, the authors aim to argue that knowledge assets represent the IC's components, and the Knoware Tree and the Knoware Dashboard are proposed as frameworks to assess the IC within regions. For the global assessment of the IC, the Regional Intellectual Capital Index (RICI) is to be introduced and its application is proposed for the assessment of the IC within Italian regions. Finally, in order to explore the links between the IC ownership of a region and its value creation dynamics, the Value Creation Index (VCI) is adopted and linear correlations of the RICI and VCI are performed, providing first empirical evidences of the positive links between IC and value creation.

The paper integrates the results of an intensive literature review with a longitudinal empirical research applied to Italian regions.

The paper provides a knowledge‐based understanding of the IC, highlighting the existence of a positive correlation between IC and value creation of the Italian regions.

The adoption of linear correlation for analysing the empirical data set could be considered as a research limitation, since more rigorous statistical approaches, such as the robust canonical analysis and the structural equation modelling could be adopted.

The paper provides a methodology for assessing IC within regions.

The proposed frameworks for assessing IC within regions are original as well as the empirical results showing a positive links between IC ownership and value creation.