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‘You may well argue that industrial espionage is not a threat to your particular company. If these are your thoughts, you are living with a false sense of security.’

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the Intellectual Capital perspective can be altered in order to include ethically questionable practices of knowledge acquisition.

The paper explores the relationship between formal and illicit forms of intellectual capital acquisition through a case study of the Formula 1 industry. The paper is based on secondary data from public sources.

Ethically questionable practices are a part of the knowledge economy. In the case study, the view on what was ethical and accepted was changed due to uncovered practices of espionage.

Firms in knowledge‐intensive industries often employ unrecognized informal channels for intellectual capital acquisition. Managers should consider the boundary between right and wrong in their particular industry, and whether they have the tools for dealing with ethically questionable practices.

The paper suggests a complementary interpretation of the Formula 1 industry not only as a best‐practice case of how community and trust knowledge spillovers facilitate innovation, but also how ethically questionable practices of intellectual capital acquisition exist as an accepted part of the process.

Intellectual capital's (IC's) rising value in the production of wealth has been mirrored by its increasing vulnerability to crime. Among these are the increasing frequency of cybercrime, the intangible nature of IC which facilitates theft and the lack of legal remedies for the theft of IC. Taken together, these factors have created a new environment in which IC is uniquely at risk from financial crime. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to examine the efficacy in current legal remedies and formulate suggestions for better protecting IC.

The analysis is conceptual, using frameworks drawn from legal scholarship and traditional views of law‐enforcement practice.

This paper explores the risks of crime inherent in IC and a distributed cyber environment in greater detail in order to demonstrate that traditional legal remedies are largely ineffective to protect IC property rights and that, given this policy environment and the nature of IC itself, prevention is the only reasonable means for protecting IC.

Conceptual papers offer an intrinsically different form of evidence than empirical studies. Significant public debate prior to enacting legislation and subsequent empirical testing of the paper's propositions, if enacted into legislation, are strongly encouraged.

The paper includes implications for the development of legal protections based on guarding sensitive information at its source, rather than traditional reactive policing and legal actions after a theft has been committed.

This paper fulfils an identified need to propose useful and concrete legal solutions that deal with the increasing importance of IC and the concomitant frequency of crimes that involve its theft.

As emphasised by the theory of knowledge-based view, knowledge constitutes the basic element for a firm’s competitive advantage. Consequently, a firm’s knowledge at risk could have an adverse effect on its performance. In this regard, this paper aims to investigate potential knowledge risks present in an (ICT)-supported collaborative project and establishes inter- and multi-relationships among these risks.

In this paper, an integrated approach using the total interpretive structural modelling (TISM) technique and MICMAC analysis is implemented to determine the hierarchical inter-relationships among knowledge risks and classify them according to their driving and dependence power.

The result reveals seven knowledge risks. The analysis establishes cybercrime and espionage as high drivers of knowledge risks in an ICT-supported collaborative project. Further, a comprehensive model is developed showing the hierarchical structure and multi- and inter-relationships among the analysed risks.

From a practical viewpoint, the proposed model in this study will be of great importance to practitioners because it highlights the most prominent knowledge risks in an ICT-supported collaborative project. Additionally, it will provide a clue for effective knowledge risk management in a systematic approach.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is one of the first studies to use both the TISM technique and MICMAC analysis to identify and classify knowledge risks in an ICT-supported collaborative project.

When the economy takes a nosedive, a more sinister type of business is likely to flourish — industrial espionage — reports ex‐Fraud Squad member, Vincent Carratu. The threat comes from companies who are determined to outwit competitors in a contracting market and from aggrieved employees who fall prey to the cash incentives of selling secrets. Carratu, who now heads one of Europe's biggest investigation agencies, pinpoints some of the security loopholes which are all too easy for the industrial spy.