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Claims the greatest challenge facing the accounting profession is understanding the huge difference between its balance sheet and market valuation. This gap represents the core value of the company – its intellectual capital represented by brands, products, competitive advantage, patents, trade marks, customer relationships, R&D, human capital etc. The present financial accounting framework is criticised, especially in the USA and Europe, as inadequate and failing to communicate the most important assets and resources of today’s business, known as intangible assets or intellectual capital. As a result, there is a huge value gap and distortions between a business entity value as reported in the financial statements with the value put by investors on the stock market or even in merger and acquisitions cases. In the new knowledge economy (k‐economy), knowledge rather than physical assets drives innovations, revenue and profits growth, and nurtures new competitive advantages. Looks at the challenges encountered by accounting and where it is heading in the k‐economy environment.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of how intellectual capital (IC) unfolds in practice in organizations. This is done by answering the research question of how IC is recognized and managed in practice as expressed by managers.

An explorative, empirical and multiple case study was conducted, investigating four Swedish firms.

This paper illustrates how IC was recognized and managed in practice despite managers expressing uncertainty of what the IC concept means. More or less direct, formalized and purposeful ways were adopted. The IC elements and practices most important from a management perspective were those aligned with the overall strategy, but were seldom what was visible in financial reports.

The use of an explorative, multiple case study limits the generalizability. However, the rich view gained of how IC unfolds in practice may not always be possible using large sample, survey-studies. Future research is therefore suggested to take this paper’s insights further and investigate IC in other organizations and in other national contexts.

This paper responds to the calls for third stage IC research, by showing how IC management in practice may not be as clear and straightforward as researchers tend to assume. It also adds to the importance debate on IC accountingization, by reflecting on how an accounting dominance may not fully capture IC inside organizations. A number of practical contributions are also made.

This paper seeks to examine the adage “If it can't be measured, it can't be managed” by presenting a case study of intellectual capital (IC) practice over six years at an internationally recognised public sector IC leader – the Land and Property Authority of NSW (Lands).

The paper uses the case study method to examine critically over six years of research based on semi‐structured interviews and internal and external documents.

During this time Lands achieved national and international recognition for its IC management and reporting practices in the absence of a definitive set of IC measures. The authors show how Lands struggled with an inability to develop a specific set of IC measures to communicate its success, while still effectively communicating the impact of its IC practices through its annual reports and IC statements based on an ongoing narrative.

Lands demonstrated that it was able to meet the challenges associated with transitioning to a Government Business Enterprise through effectively managing IC resources, while also being dissatisfied with an inability to identify a set of concrete IC measures. Thus, the authors conclude from the evidence presented that it is possible to effectively implement IC practices without necessarily needing concrete IC measures. This is not because IC measures are not useful, but because Lands' IC reporting needs evolve based on the bespoke nature of its business, political expectations and changing business plans.

As always, the observations and conclusions reached here are limited to the case of Lands and are based on the authors' objective analysis. Therefore, care should be taken in generalising any findings and this highlights the need to understand the IC context before applying the findings.

The conclusion highlights the struggle many organisations face when developing appropriate IC measures. While there appears to be a fixation on developing an “accounting for IC”, the authors advocate that the fixation is misplaced and the IC journey is better communicated narrating the story of how IC is mobilised. Doing so allows more focus on IC practices rather than on accounting. This opens the debate as to whether an accounting for IC can provide a solution, given that IC is more complex than developing an IC balance sheet.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the IC Rating™ approach as a management consulting approach to measure intellectual capital and to report on the implementation and experience in one case study firm.

The paper describes the IC Rating™ model in the context of the exiting literature in the field of IC measurement and uses a case study to demonstrate its practical application.

Based on the presented case study as well as implementations in other organizations we find the IC Rating™ model a useful tool to facilitate the analysis and discussion about intellectual capital in organizations.

The article gives a complementary view to the most commonly used score card methods and guidelines for intangibles on how intangibles can be measured. IC Rating™ focuses on the comparability between companies and industries as well as a simplification of how to interpret intangible measures.

The original idea for the paper was to answer the question “Why do companies really need to measure and develop intangibles?”. The answer is “To improve company financial performance”. The IC Rating™ methodology is therefore based on the answers to two other questions: “Which parameters does an executive manager need to have insightful knowledge of, in order to make the right decisions for the future?” and “From where and whom should the executive manager receive this information?”.

This paper aims to investigate inter firm intellectual capital (IC) disclosures and its variations in top 20 listed pharmaceutical companies in India, study the category wise and element wise IC disclosures (ICD), find out the impact of ICD on the creation of IC in monetary terms, find out correlation between IC valuation and its disclosure, and test significance of correlation.

This is an exploratory and empirical study of ICD by sample companies in 2009 using content analysis. IC is valued as market value minus book value. Five‐point scale (0‐4), mean disclosure score, range, Chi‐ squares, Karl Pearson's correlation and Student's t‐test are used for analysis and interpretation.

Although top 20 companies of knowledge‐led industry, ICD are low, narrative and varying significantly among companies. ICD score varies in range of 4 to 36 against expected score of 96. External capital with mean score of 18.78 is the most disclosed category. Brands and business collaborations is most disclosed element of IC, followed by employee competence and internal organizational capital respectively. ICD leads to creation of IC in some companies. Markets reflected true valuations of ICD in seven companies, and high degree of inconsistency in 13 companies. Overall correlation between IC valuation and disclosure is negative, weak and insignificant.

Sector‐specific intangible asset monitors should be formulated to capture ICD.

The paper measures ICD using five‐point scaling technique, it uses Chi‐ square test (non‐parametric test) to calculate inter‐firm variations. The paper also correlates ICD and valuation of respective companies with Spearman's correlation for the first time in pharmaceutical companies in India. It proposes inclusion of fourth category i.e. sector‐specific items in existing models of ICD.

This paper focuses on the concept of Intellectual Capital (IC) of Nations and the need for a change of perspectives from financial to intellectual values. Although the paper briefly describes the concept of IC within business, the principal focus is on IC of Nations. IC of a Nation includes the hidden values of individuals, enterprises, and institutions, communities and regions that are the current and potential sources for wealth creation. It is proposed that every nation should start a process in visualising and measuring IC as a complement to traditional state finances. The present paper also examines the ongoing prototyping within Sweden, Israel and Austria that was initiated in 1996. In addition, the paper describes one of the tools — the IC Navigator for Nations — that can be used to present a pedagogical and holistic view and bring balance between intellectual and financial capital. Examples of indicators of IC for Sweden and Israel are described.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the manner and impact of intellectual capital (IC) disclosure. To frame the discussion, elements of Giddens' “structuration” theory and narrative theory are used to analyse change from within an organisation.

Using a case study approach, this paper explores the impact of the narrative disclosure of IC by an Australian public sector organisation, the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Lands (Lands), which is the first Australian government organisation to externally disclose IC.

By taking a structuralist approach to analysing the narrative disclosure of IC this paper moved beyond attempting to quantify or identify the wealth created by IC, and thus account for IC. By investigating the narrative disclosure of IC, initially in the form of the IC statement as a supplement to the annual report, it was shown how at Lands the use of narrative became routinized in the activities of management. Thus narrative was no longer used to only provide understanding of the IC measures and the reasoning behind the use of IC, but to provide a mechanism that engendered further management action and subsequent organisational change.

The limitation of this paper is that it provides a lone example of a particular organisation from which generalisations are not possible. But it is possible to extend this research, using the structuration framework, to other organisations that have engendered the use of narrative to disclose IC to both internal and external stakeholders. Doing so will further question the domination of “accounting” within the IC paradigm and provide additional insights that allows practitioners and academics to develop additional tools for understanding and utilising IC.

This paper investigates the manner and impact of IC disclosure from within an organisation by use of “structuration” and narrative theory to analyse change as a result of the implementation of IC practices.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate intellectual capital (IC) measurement critically so that the dynamics of intangible value creation can be better understood and to provide insights into how IC is constructed rather than what IC is.

This paper presents a case study on how a division of a large Australian financial institution utilised an approach based on complexity theory to investigate IC in practice. The method utilises narrative, numbers and visualisations to make sense of IC at a particular point in time.

It is argued that trying to “fit” existing popular frameworks to gather IC measurements inside organisations has little relevance to understanding the value‐creation process. As a result of the investigation of IC in this paper, it is found that, to date, IC measurement has relied heavily on “accountingisation” and that alternate methods to understand IC need to be developed. The paper highlights that academics and practitioners need to develop new skills.

The case study is limited to the use of an alternate method to investigate IC in a particular organisational and cultural setting. The research opens the possibility of the benefits of changing thinking about both research into, and the practice of, measuring IC.

Rather than being constrained by the traditional models of measuring intangibles, by way of contemporary IC reporting frameworks, a more open process is outlined that could improve the timeliness and use value of the information.

This paper has relevance to both IC academics and practitioners as it critically examines the contemporary IC frameworks and offers an alternate method for examining IC which has the potential to add to a discourse which focuses on additional understanding of IC.

Companies use figures within the annual report to send messages. The purpose of this paper is to explore the opinions and understandings of annual report preparers who produce the figures and users who interpret them. The focus is on figures that the authors consider convey messages about the company's intellectual capital (IC).

The paper used a questionnaire to obtain the opinions of “informed investors” and conducted interviews with the preparers of the annual reports. It compared the opinions of the two respondent groups.

Preparers and users bring multiple meanings to the figures. Users overlooked some messages which were complex and symbolic and also perceived more messages than intended by the preparers. The two respondent groups generally perceived brands, corporate image building and aspects related to employees as the IC items best portrayed in the selected figures. Most users and some preparers perceived the main reason for using figures was their strength as a marketing tool.

The paper is exploratory in nature and there is scope to extend the work to a greater number of annual reports and/or figures. The research is limited by the use of students as a proxy for users of annual reports.

The findings may be helpful to annual report preparers in understanding the rhetorical impact of images. Such understanding will help them in choosing figures which are effective and persuasive when seeking user engagement.

The authors are not aware of any prior research that examines the perceptions of preparers and users in respect of messages conveyed through figures, and, in particular, research that incorporates aspects of IC in corporate annual report figures. The paper, therefore, extends the empirical literature on IC.