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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.

Intellectual capital (IC), knowledge management and intangible assets are important factors in determining the value of an organization, as reflected in the growth of the knowledge management industry. There is however, a lack of effective measurement techniques to specify and optimize the value of IC. This paper presents a detailed review of existing techniques and establish the need for a more comprehensive approach. The proposed framework addresses IC valuation issues across the IC cycle. People, process, and technology are measured and correlated in the final step with social and financial measures, thus providing a new framework.

In the past decade, intellectual capital (IC) measurement and reporting have been feeding scientific debate; however, only few studies address these issues together. The present research aims to provide an integrated view of the topics covered by the existing literature and to highlight the emerging research trends and set the agenda for future research.

This study develops a structured literature review (SLR) of the extant research concerned with IC measurement and reporting, using a comprehensive sample of 1,021 articles extracted from the Scopus database.

The findings of the SLR show that the existing literature focuses on seven research areas: IC and public sector; IC university and education; IC evaluation method; internal and external IC disclosure; IC and CSR; management of IC in organizations; other. Overall, findings indicate that IC measurement and reporting are highly researched topics that continue to attract the interests of scholars. Finally, the SLR analysis has allowed outlining a future research agenda, with particular reference to the IC evaluation method and internal and external IC disclosure research areas.

The main limitation of this research lies in the manual screening of relevant studies, which entails some degree of subjectivity. Furthermore, another limitation research could be considered the use of a single database (Scopus).

The present study brings potential contributions for scholars and practitioners. From a scholarly perspective, the paper provides a systematization of scientific contributions that have dealt with IC measurement and reporting. In particular, it contributes to the scholarly debate bringing into focus various IC measurement and reporting issues in the landscape of private and public organizations. Referring to practical implications, our research supports the strategic use of IC measurement and reporting as a key lever for improving the management of firms. Using an analytical framework that combines insights from the agency, stakeholder and legitimacy theories, this study highlights that IC reporting activity should be used strategically as a means to engage with all firm's stakeholders, in particular with a view to reducing information asymmetry and improving firm reputation.

The public sector is one of the least addressed areas of intellectual capital (IC) research. Universities are an interesting area of investigation because they are considered critical players in the knowledge-based society. The purpose of this paper is to develop a more general, flexible and comprehensive “IC Maturity Model” for Universities (ICMM), a framework for defining and implementing IC measurement and management approaches, as part of the whole strategic management of universities. Thus, the ICMM proposes a staged framework to initiate a step-by-step change within a university based upon its current level of IC management maturity. The different steps of maturity might be an answer to cope with the huge diversity of European universities, some of which have strong managerial orientation, while others follow collegial forms of governance.

The research approach is based on what has been called the “third stage” of IC research (Dumay and Garanina, 2013), focused on the practices of IC approaches rather than on its theoretical conceptualisation. The ICMM has been developed under the “Quality Assurance in Higher Education through Habilitation and Auditing” project framework, initiated by the Executive Agency for Higher Education and Research Funding of Romania (EUFISCDI). Three Mutual Learning Workshops (MLWs) were organised as a mean to bring together 15 international experts and practitioners to share their views and experience on IC reporting and setting up task forces.

An ICMM, which is a flexible model of implementing IC approaches within public universities, is developed. The ICMM provides a theoretical continuum along which the process of maturity can be developed incrementally from one level to the next, moving from IC data collection, awareness of IC, adjustment of IC specific indicators, measurement of IC, reporting of IC, interpretation and decision making, strategy and planning.

Future research needs to conduct empirical studies in universities to generalise the effectiveness of the ICMM model and guidelines for implementation.

The ICMM provides a staged framework to initiate a step-by-step change within a university based upon its current level of IC management maturity and its IC value creation dynamics. It allows universities to follow different paths, not necessarily a linear sequence.

Although several methods for IC measurement and management exist, most of these cannot accommodate the trade-off between the comparability aims and the efforts to capture the institution’s uniqueness when designing an IC model.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a new framework for managing intellectual capital (IC) inside a university considering the collective intelligence perspective.

The research method uses the fourth stage of IC research and adopts the collective intelligence approach. The underlying assumption behind the framework is to consider the university as a collective intelligence system in which the tangible and intellectual assets are coordinated towards the achievement of strategic goals.

The conceptual framework for IC management harnesses the power of IC, collectively created by the engagement of multiple stakeholders inside the university network. The main components are the final goal of a university (what); the collective human capital to achieve the goal (who); the processes activated inside the university (how); and finally the motivations behind the achievement of the goal (why).

The research is exploratory and the framework offers opportunities for refinement. Future research is needed to verify the application of the framework to other organisations in the public sector intended as collective intelligence systems. A new perspective for managing IC in universities adopting the collective intelligence approach is developed. Contribution to the fourth stage (ecosystem) of IC research is highlighted, expanding the concept of IC value creation beyond the university into wider society.

The framework can be used to manage IC strategically in all the systems interpreted as collective intelligence systems in which the role of IC creation from multiple actors is relevant. This makes possible the understanding of how IC helps create value for the society and the region in which the university operates.

The originality of the paper is in bringing together issues usually dealt within the literature in separate domains, such as IC management and collective intelligence perspective. The concept of collective intelligence remains an unexplored field in relation to IC management in the public sector. The collective intelligence approach provides a novel contribution to managing IC and is intended to inspire future research.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the transition from measurement to management in relation to intellectual capital (IC). It aims to understand the relationships between measurement of IC and operational activities, strategies and context.

This study takes an “action research” perspective to investigate the management of the analysed company in respect to IC.

The study concerns a company operating in the field of electronics and defence, which has developed a model of IC management. Every project set up by the company that impacts on IC is subject to measurement, valuation and reporting. This model aims to be an effective support to general management, providing a link between intangible assets and capabilities that create value.

This study does not aim to develop a framework for IC measurement but to highlight the process leading to implementing an IC framework in practice.

Knowledge is the currency of the current economy, a vital organisational asset and a key to creating a sustainable competitive advantage. The consequent interest in knowledge management (KM) has spurred an exponential increase in publications covering a broad spectrum of diverse and overlapping research areas. The purpose of this paper is to provide a literature review and categorised analysis of the rapidly growing number of KM publications, and offer a comprehensive reference for new-comers embarking on research in the field with a particular focus on the area of knowledge measurement.

A total of 350 articles published in peer-reviewed journals over the last decade are carefully reviewed, analysed and categorised according to their specific subject matter in the KM context.

KM research tends to fall in one of five categories: Ontology of Knowledge and KM, Knowledge Management Systems, Role of Information Technology, Managerial and Social issues, and Knowledge Measurement. Despite the accumulation of extensive publication efforts in some areas, a series of disagreements and a theory-practice gap are revealed as challenging issues that need to be addressed.

The scope of this study does not cover KM research in its entirety due to the vast nature of the research field.

This paper presents a new birds-eye view of the KM landscape through a novel taxonomy of KM research providing researchers with new insights for future applied research, and offers a comprehensive critical review of major knowledge measurement frameworks.

The purpose of this paper is to present a framework for intellectual capital (IC) disclosure in cross-cultural E-tourism which includes identifying key success factors, as well as selecting indicators in operational level.

The method described in this paper involves IC process model initiating from strategy formulation, following key success factors analyst by using a detailed interpretative structural model (ISM) instrument, and the indicators selection employing Delphi approach. The paper explicates methodological decisions associated with cross-cultural E-tourism context: selecting the appropriate specialists panel; the approach to data collection; and selecting the measurable indicators.

This paper proposes three critical components of the framework: key success factors that based on an organization's strategies and contexts; indicators that measure and monitor the value of IC; an IC model that can help cross-cultural E-tourism enterprise improve management effectively.

This paper extends the methodology developed previously to examine IC information in tourism enterprise. The paper introduces an alternative methodological paradigm to the study of IC measurement framework by employing the ISM. This exploratory study employs IC process model to build up cross-cultural E-tourism IC model, which is a start point for the value and performance research of this kind of enterprise.

Although several frameworks for measuring and reporting Intellectual Capital (IC) have been developed over the past two decades, their actual use in practice is still limited. The purpose of this paper is to answer the call to analyze IC practices from a critical and performative perspective by investigating how and why IC indicators may end up not being used, thus shedding light on the barriers to their use.

The paper presents a single in-depth case study and focusses attention on the fragility of the IC indicators as well on the interactions that occur among subjects while transmitting IC indicators.

The case analysis shows how the different perspectives and expectations that are at stake when subjects engage with IC indicators can play a central role in hindering or enabling their use in practice. Expecting IC indicators to be able to accurately represent and to objectively signal the size and the growth/decline of IC, i.e. to be complete and isomorphic measures, can act as a barrier to their use. The case also shows that scores play a role in hindering the use of the IC indicators; the subjects disputed the scores when they did not confirm their perception of reality, and the lack of completeness and isomorphism of the IC indicators, i.e. their fragility, was the reason put forward to justify the subjects’ refusal to accept the scores and thus, to use these measures.

Although the use of a single case study provides in-depth and rich data, it also limits the generalizability of the observations to other companies. Moreover, the findings obtained may be influenced by the specific IC framework and indicators adopted.

Differently from most previous IC research, this paper focusses attention on the transmission of indicators and ultimately, on their “fate,” and it contributes to the understanding of how and why IC indicators may be produced but not used, thus hindering the diffusion of IC frameworks in practice.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to understanding how measuring intellectual capital (IC) can favor IC mobilization, examining the role of actors who design and implement the system in influencing managers’ IC learning processes and their take up of IC management practices.

A constructive case study, in which the researcher was directly involved in measuring IC, is presented. Kolb's experiential learning theory model examines if and how the actors mobilized IC and how the researcher and controller influenced their learning process.

The paper shows that actors must complete an experiential learning cycle to mobilize IC. The controller's role is pivotal in promoting IC mobilization, provided he/she experiences a deep learning process and he/she moves from “IC counting” to “IC accounting.” The paper also highlights how research intervention contributes to IC mobilization by influencing the actors’ learning process.

The paper is limited to one Italian company, so the results cannot be generalized; they were influenced by the researcher's “strong” interventionist approach and by the model adopted.

Companies introducing IC will become aware of barriers and levers to measuring and mobilizing IC, thus enabling them to devise strategies to avoid the former and take advantage of the latter.

The experiential learning theory model offers an alternative way of understanding how IC measurement produces effects and how the controller and researcher can influence the managers’ IC learning journey thus contributing to mobilization of IC.