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This paper aims to address the use of modelling and simulation tools to enhance intangible process assets management by simulating and automating their characterization depending on their quality and impact on an organizational business goal.

The authors conducted a study comparing two simulation-based approaches to characterize intangible assets: system dynamics and agent-based simulation.

Strategic business studies have not yet considered the use of simulation techniques to characterize the intangible assets at length. The proposed solution introduces significant improvements for strategic data visualization, providing company stakeholders with a practical and helpful prism through which to view an easily adaptable, cheap and meaningful source of information about their company’s process assets, and their behaviour based on operation indicators.

This research offers decision-makers in knowledge-intensive organizations alternatives for effective strategic decision-making and for leveraging prospective views based on the specification of the organization’s knowledge. To do this, stakeholders will be able to use very promising low-cost simulation-based tools to create practical scenarios and potential situations that generate inputs for debate and decision-making by senior and middle management.

This paper reports an unprecedented comparative study of system dynamics and agent-based simulation to speed-up the characterization of the intangible process assets based on their quality and impact on strategic goals. It stresses the benefits and implications of the use of these techniques for better strategic management.

The purpose of this paper is to present the strategic intangible process assets characterization (SIPAC) methodology illustrated by an example of its application to the field of information technology (IT). This is a pioneering methodology for characterizing the impact and quality of intangible process assets and intellectual capital as levers to achieve organizational objectives. This strategic intellectual capital approach will help to identify both intangible assets and indicators geared to meeting organizational objectives. This is of vital importance since the success of an organization can be construed in terms of goal achievement.

The paper illustrates an example of the step-by-step application of the proposed methodology at an IT company. The aim is to describe its use in a real case so that other companies can benefit from the replication of the methodology used.

The proposed methodology (SIPAC) that the authors have designed and applied has been found to be useful and provide an insightful new point of view for strategic decision making in the IT industry taking into account intangible process assets.

The proposed methodology has been exemplified in a real case. This should help organizations to use the methodology to replicate the results.

Each and every organization has know-how represented by intangible assets. This paper meets an identified need to use intangible process assets as levers to help organizations achieve their business goals.

The purpose of this paper is to construct and propose a definition for intangibles derived from the resource‐based view (RBV) of the firm for use in academic research and practical applications.

Intangibles are defined as a subset of corporate resources. In this paper, various definitions for intangibles are tested against the RBV framework.

The majority of definitions in the extant literature are (implicitly or explicitly) in synchronization with the RBV. Thus, it is possible to find and propose a common definition for intangibles.

Some researchers argue that the field is still in its embryonic stages and thus the concepts might still be too fresh in order to find a stable common definition.

The paper offers a conceptual lens through which one can clearly link intangibles to strategy and offers a proposed definition of intangibles that incorporates a meta‐review of the literature.

The paper shows that it is in fact possible to accommodate various definitions of intangibles under one common framework and propose a unified characterization.

This paper offers a way of revivifying classical accounting research in the form of a pragmatist neoclassical programme with a sound epistemological underpinning.

The paper draws on a pragmatist perspective on financial accounting and accounting research springing from John Dewey's theory of inquiry.

Although a pragmatist underpinning does not entail specific methodological prescriptions, it can provide fruitful insights in research design. The paper discusses the structure and content of a research programme drawing on a pragmatist underpinning and sets out proposals for a practical research agenda. Although the agenda is shaped around the topic of identifiable intangibles, much of the paper has substantially wider relevance.

The approach justifies a revival in scholarly research employing classical methods and directed at improving accounting methods and standards.

The approach would promote closer engagement between scholarly accounting and practitioners such as standard-setters, making some contribution to closing the widely acknowledged gap between research and practice.

The paper offers a neoclassical programme of research drawing considerably more extensively on pragmatist philosophy than did theorisation in the classical period.

Information technology/software (IT/SW) professionals use the business model canvas (BMC) to identify innovative digital solutions that improve their client’s business values. This paper aims to address the issue of considering, for a client company, the status of its intangible assets (IAs) in decision-making on the most innovative digital solution.

This paper provides a method (BMCIA-method) and a simulation tool (BMCIA-NetSim) to help IT/SW professionals identify and assess an organization’s IAs and their impact on the BMC of digital business.

IT/SW professionals used this approach, at 14 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), to identify innovative solutions and add digital value to their businesses. They used the BMCIA to provide their clients (SME’s chief executive officer or chief operating officer) with a view of the BMC enhanced with the status of IAs. These expressed interest in the use of the BMCIA and underscore its importance for making better decisions while aligning IT and the business. A survey reveals how well the BMCIA-method performed during its use to discover the best solution to be developed at each SME.

IAs affect the achievement of the business goal targeted using the BMC. If these are not identified, valued and properly aligned with the BMC blocks, critical information is hidden from the eyes of IT/SW professionals and their clients, preventing optimal decision-making on which is the best IT/SW solution to be implemented to add digital value to the client company.

This proposal is unique insofar as it outlines a simulation-based methodological and technical solution using software agents to simulate the impact of the intangible side of an organization on its business model.

The provision of value, as a marketing issue, is receiving increasing attention from managers and scholars. This attention, in combination with strong calls for better quantification and stronger measures in marketing, has lead to increased interest in the assessment, quantified where possible, of the provision of value through buyer–seller relationships. This paper identifies dimensions of value provision through relationships in business markets with specific emphasis on the intangible aspects of value, which are important to long-term competitive advantage. The provision of value to the seller is the prime focus in this paper. The paper discusses the meaning of both tangible and intangible relationship value and the interplay between them and notes the importance of assessing the intangible part of the value, particularly the part which derives from the human aspects of the relationship. Despite their importance, the human aspects of relationships and their contribution to value is a sparse topic among researchers. The paper compares and evaluates potentially useful relationship and value conceptualizations. The paper discusses studies of relationship value and then outlines the results of a recent line of empirical research into the provision of value by a buyer to a seller that utilizes a framework synthesized from the intellectual capital literature. This recent research conceptualizes the potential for a seller's relationship with a buyer to provide intangible value to the seller in terms of, first, the resources available in the buyer and second, the capabilities of the buyer's boundary personnel to aid in facilitating the flow of those resources to the seller. The paper also includes the softer human aspects in the dimensions of value. These latter aspects are important to a full assessment of value. The paper concludes with a discussion of aspects of intangible relationship value that need further elucidation and will thus provide opportunities for future research.

The current scenario is dominated by an urgent need for economic recovery caused by the global health emergency that has been at work since January 2020. Digital transformation plays a crucial role in bringing about this recovery. However, the failure rate of digital transformation projects over the last 10 years is very high. Considering the growing demand for digital transformation from businesses, the digital transformation failure rate, if unchanged, could lead to an exponential growth in technical debt. Technical debt is acquired when the digital transformation to be deployed at a business fails. The accumulation of technical debt will lead not only to economic stalemate but possibly also to yet another setback.

The developed set of methodologies form what has been termed the Digital Transformation Governance Engineering Process (DTGEP). This process can help any business wishing to undertake a digital transformation project to materialize their project in a sustainable, productive and competitive way.

DTGEP prevents the generation of technical debt because organizational knowledge is aligned with the technological solution that best suits the needs of each business in order to support its strategic or business objectives.

DTGEP has already been used to successfully discover the relationship between business features and the prospective digital transformation. However, it needs to be applied in case studies on many other businesses across the economy in order to gather more accurate information that could be clustered by sectors.

DTGEP was tested on a set of 25 projects, and this paper reports several interesting findings regarding its use, like the impact of the digital transformation on different parts of the business model canvas (BMC) and the intellectual capital of the organization developing the digital transformation, and how the status of the organization's intangible assets affects the decision-making process with respect to the prospective digital transformation.

We must acknowledge the importance of intangibles in today’s economies and the controversy over the accounting and reporting of these assets. For this reason, the purpose of this paper is to synthesize the lessons learned from research to date and identify gaps in that research that would be useful to academics and practitioners.

The literature review was conducted after an analysis of the most important academic databases in the period of 1990-2013: ABI Inform Complete, CSIS, EconLit, ISOC, Journal Citation Reports, Scopus, Emerald, Springer, and Google Scholar.

The authors offer a summary of the main gaps in the literature on intellectual capital disclosures, among which the authors perceive a need for increased qualitative or explanatory research, which would allow further analysis of such decisions.

Specifically, the main problem encountered in the research on voluntary disclosure of intangibles appears to relate to the type of methodology used, which is usually quantitative or descriptive.

Given that the principal limitations in the field of the disclosure of intangibles have been discussed, the authors conclude by indicating the principal directions for future research.

Qualitative analysis is absent in the literature the authors reviewed, and considered it fundamental to understanding this type of disclosure. In fact, the development of future lines of research could provide better-quality intangible asset reporting.

Although there are previous studies on this topic, the authors believe that the main contribution of this study is to offer an integrated framework of existing findings concerning decisions by companies to disclose information on intangibles, a topic on which previous literature is sparse.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on the non-essence of accounting by focusing on financial accounting’s distinct technology: financial statements. Complementing the genealogical perspective on accounting’s changing socio-historical settings, it proposes a semiotic perspective on the accounting statement.

The paper takes an interdisciplinary approach in the theoretical framing of IFRS recognition and measurement principles that underlie the statement of financial position. It mobilises Saussure and Barthes’ sign theory – semiology, as it provides a meaningful delineation of financial accounting, bringing out its distinct numerical-linguistic knowledge-construction operation.

In addition to the justification of employing semiology as a parent discipline for accounting, it is shown how IASB’s recognition and measurement procedures manifest the interrelated non-essentialist semiological principles of reciprocal articulation and value constellation. Accounting entries (“expression”) are not representations of pre-existing economic resources (“content”), but rather both are mutually constituted by delimiting the resource/asset from its broader category. Such judgment-based articulation results with value constellations, where asset value is merely a relational product of other values.

To the long-established critique that accounting has no essence, the paper adds a formulation of a non-essentialist semiotic logic: the financial statement’s semio-logic. It further sheds light on the role of such logic as an epistemological presupposition to the accounting – society reciprocity, where accounting is a malleable product of, and is used to exert power over, its social surroundings.