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This research aims to contribute to the current discussion led by international accounting bodies on intellectual capital narratives. Before setting a standard, a preliminary step is to highlight intellectual capital components' sources of value. The objective of this exploratory paper is to contribute to the discussion by proposing a detailed description and taxonomy of intellectual capital based on an analysis of discretionary accounting narrative disclosures in CEO letters.

To answer the research question, a computerised lexical content analysis was done of 241 letters from the CEOs of S&P Euro 350 companies addressed to shareholders.

Beyond the required disclosures about balance sheet intangibles, this study brings to light discretionary narratives about human, digital, customer and environmental capital and their interactions. In particular, CEOs are promoting two new themes, environmental capital and digital capital, as major contributors to value creation.

The limitations of this study are inherent in the media studied, namely the CEOs' letters to shareholders, which were written as part of the firms' official communication.

The main contribution of the research is a detailed description of the intellectual capital components that CEOs consider to be at the heart of their companies' models to create value. Human and customer capital were already familiar under the previous classification, but CEOs present digital and environmental capital as areas of opportunity or risk in their discretionary narratives.

The article contributes to the current international discussions on intellectual capital by focusing on discretionary accounting narratives. It seeks to provide guidelines concerning future standards in the current stage of intellectual capital research.

Environmental capabilities, allowing companies to carry out their productive activities in ways that limit damage to natural environment, are at the heart of the fourth stage of research in intellectual capital. Accordingly, the purpose of this research is to explore firm's current environmental capabilities, disclosed by managers through corporate messages, that participate to the development of sustainable intellectual capital (SIC).

With this in mind, we first conducted a lexical content analysis followed by a thematic content analysis of 241 letters to shareholders from the CEOs of major European companies published in 2016.

The lexical content analysis reveals that managers of major European companies have developed green alliances to address the energy transition challenge by modifying their manufacturing processes. The thematic content analysis of the CEOs discourse highlights that managerial competencies, continuous innovation and stakeholder integration are key environmental capabilities that matter to CEOs.

This study contributes to the fourth stage of research on IC highlighting the environmental capabilities and resources that are disclosed by companies in their corporate communication. Our results enhance the understanding on how environmental capabilities and resources enhance the human, organizational, technological and relational sustainable intellectual capital.

This research highlights the importance of green alliances that allow companies to address the challenge of the ecological transition. In this context, the continuous innovation capability seems to be a fruitful way of gaining competitive advantage in this challenge.

This paper provides a detailed description of the environmental capabilities that participate to the development of the human, technological and relational SIC.

The purpose of this paper is to enhance knowledge of the full set of interrelations between IC components by providing an inductive typology of their strategic interactions.

To answer the research question the author conducted a content analysis of CEOs’ letters to shareholders published by 122 companies among the 200 first companies from the Fortune Global 500 from 2008 to 2012.

The results show that these three IC components interact with each other around the central position held by relational and structural capital and to a lesser extent human capital. Companies that have a positive evolution in the ranking focus significantly more on the structural capital while those who have a negative evolution in the ranking mention more the relational capital.

The study is based on the CEOs’ letters that might limit the generalization of the findings. Nonetheless, this research highlights a full and fruitful set of interrelations between IC components providing a business practices-oriented typology.

This study provides deep insights into the interrelations between IC components that can significantly help managers to identify the strategic connections between IC dimensions.

This study contributes to the literature by expanding the actual academic classification of IC to five clusters of components. This research highlights that relational capital interacting with structural capital holds a central position in companies’ business strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the emergence and existence of retro-industries. The paper proposes using a multidisciplinary approach to define the concept of retro-industries and to identify its specificities.

Literature reviews in marketing and economics were used to create a model of innovation adoption and diffusion in retro-industries.

The paper provides theoretical insights about the factors that foster retro-industries such as heritage, tradition, nostalgia and revival. The paper suggests that these factors influence innovations mechanisms and explain the use of the past to manage the challenges of the future.

The paper enriches an identified need to analyse industry from retro perspective; and to identify the factors that foster the emergence of such industries.