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In 2000, Cañibano et al. published a literature review entitled “Accounting for Intangibles: A Literature Review”. This paper revisits the conclusions drawn in that paper. We also discuss the intervening developments in scholarly research, standard setting and practice over the past 20+ years to outline the future challenges for research into accounting for intangibles.

We conducted a literature review to identify past developments and link the findings to current accounting standard-setting developments to inform our view of the future.

Current intangibles accounting practices are conservative and unlikely to change. Accounting standard setters are more interested in how companies report and disclose the value of intangibles rather than changing how they are determined. Standard setters are also interested in accounting for new forms of digital assets and reporting economic, social, governance and sustainability issues and how these link to financial outcomes. The IFRS has released complementary sustainability accounting standards for disclosing value creation in response to the latter. Therefore, the topic of intangibles stretches beyond merely how intangibles create value but how they are also part of a firm’s overall risk and value creation profile.

There is much room academically, practically, and from a social perspective to influence the future of accounting for intangibles. Accounting standard setters and alternative standards, such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and European Union non-financial and sustainability reporting directives, are competing complementary initiatives.

Our results reveal a window of opportunity for accounting scholars to research and influence how intangibles and other non-financial and sustainability accounting will progress based on current developments.

The purpose of this study is to identify the norms that underlie and condition the decisions made by preparers of financial reports.

This interview-based study illustrates how financial report preparers engage in behaviors linked to the perception of recognition and measurement of internally generated intangible assets by important stakeholders. All of the companies included in the study adhere to International Financial Reporting Standards when creating their consolidated financial statements. The participants selected for the study are involved in accounting decisions related to research and development in accordance with International Accounting Standard (IAS) 38.

The authors identify the normative assumptions underlying the recognition and measurement of internally generated intangibles, which are based on concerns of consistency, credibility and reasonableness. The authors find that the normative basis for legitimacy in financial accounting is primarily related to cognitive legitimacy and is not of a moral or pragmatic nature.

The study reveals that recognition and measurement of internally generated intangibles in financial accounting relate to legitimacy. The authors identify specific norms that form the basis of this legitimacy, namely, consistency, credibility and reasonableness. These identified norms serve as constraints, mitigating the risk of judgment misuse within the IAS 38 framework for earnings management.

According to the Project Management Institute, 70% of projects fail globally. The causes of project failure in many instances can be identified as non-technical or behavioral in nature arising from interactions between participants. These intangible risks can emerge in any project setting but especially in project settings having diversity of cultures, customs, beliefs and traditions of various companies or countries. This paper provides an objective framework to address these intangible risks.

This paper presents a structured approach to identify, assess and manage intangible risks to enhance a project team’s ability to meet its objectives. The authors propose a user-friendly framework, Intangible Risk Assessment Methodology for Projects (IRAMP), to address these risks and the factors that cause them. Meta-network (e.g., a network of networks) simulation and established social network analysis (SNA) measures provide a quantitative assessment and ranking of causal events and their influence on the intangible behavior centric risks.

The proposed IRAMP and meta-network approach were utilized to examine the project delivery process of an international energy firm. Data were gathered using structured interviews, surveys and project team workshops. The use of the IRAMP to highlight intangible risk areas underpinned by the SNA measures led to changes in the company’s organizational structure to enhance project delivery effectiveness.

This work extends the existing project risk management literature by providing a novel objective approach to identify and quantify behavior centric intangible risks and the conditions that cause them to emerge.

The intangible assets of a company have been presented by national and international surveys as a resource to influence the creation of value and the increase in organizational performance. In view of this, this study aims to analyze the relationship between intangibility and the performance of companies in Latin America.

For this purpose, multiple regression with panel data was used and three perspectives for measuring intangible resources were defined: representativeness of the intangible asset, accounting measure for measuring the intangible, degree of intangibility and Tobin’ Q, the latter two representing economic and financial measures to determine intangibility. The study covered the period from 2011 to 2017 with a sample of 1,236 publicly traded companies located in some Latin American countries, namely, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru.

The results demonstrated the existence of a significant and positive relationship between the variables of intangibility, degree of intangibility and Tobin’s Q, and the performance variables, return on assets, operating margin and asset turnover, reinforcing the study hypothesis that the greater the investment in intangible resource, the greater the company’s performance.

The limitations of this study involve the lack of complete information about intangible resources in the financial statements of some companies and some countries, making it hard to analyze the proposed relationship more broadly and accurately. Another limitation involves the causal relationship that may have existed between the regressors of the models defined in the study and their error, thus generating an endogeneity problem in the proposed models. It is recommended for future research to use specific methods to mitigate possible problems of endogeneity in regressions.

Mainly the possibility of deepening the relationship between intangibility and business performance, thus obtaining new knowledge through the reflexes of this relationship on companies in Latin American countries, finding more consistent results.

The study contributes to the decision-making process in the business world by informing the primary users of accounting information such as investors, administrators, accountants, regulators and creditors.

This research contributes by addressing a theme whose studies present many gaps, making it possible to deepen the relationship between intangibility and business performance and gain new knowledge through the reflexes of this relationship on companies in Latin American countries.

Intangible legacy encapsulates the essence of Olympism and its manifestation, the Olympic Games. Despite significant interest in the capacity of the Olympics to produce notable changes in society, conceptual difficulties in defining and measuring intangible legacy persist. The study develops a conceptual definition of intangible Olympic legacy.

The study follows a four-step concept definition approach. It examines and integrates three strands of literature including intangibles, social interactions and public value, which is combined with insights from a longitudinal empirical investigation of intangible Olympic legacy for National Sport Organisations (NSO).

The proposed concept of intangible legacy defines it an emerging combination of attributes, interactions, processes and technology, with the goal of creating public value which is the ultimate goal of the Olympic Games. Since intangible legacy is qualitative rather than quantitative, a reconsideration of the current research paradigm is also proposed.

The study develops a new analytical device for the investigation of intangible legacies for specific publics such as NSO.

The study carries practical implications for Olympic and events/festival promoters as it allows defining and operationalising the key attributes of the concept.

This is the first study to conceptualise intangible legacy of mega events.

This article analyzes the links between financial reports and reputation in the context of Finnish public sector organizations. In general, the paper discusses the accounting treatment of intangible and tangible assets and the quality and relevance of public sector financial reporting.

For data, we combine three data sets: financial statement information of eight anonymous Finnish public organizations, the results of a reputation survey among their key stakeholders (N = 914) and a sample of the social media sentiment around the organizations.

Our findings suggest that a decrease in spending and, surprisingly in the nonprofit sector, an increase in the surplus, indicate better perceived financial performance. An increase in surplus is positively linked with the reputational factors, for example, trust. However, disclosing excessive amounts of information, for example, in financial reporting seems to contribute to negative discussions on social media.

We highlight the importance of managing intangibles, including those not recognized in the balance sheet, such as reputation. We present three propositions with potential managerial relevance.

Despite the considerable amount of financial information disclosed by public sector organizations, few studies have analyzed its relevance or connection to reputation. This first-of-a-kind paper combines intangible and tangible assets by analyzing how financial data and intangible reputation are linked in the public sector accounting context. Six reputational factors were discovered, and financial performance was found to correlate with trust in the public sector.

This paper aims to address the financial reporting dimensions of intangible assets with specific reference to International Accounting Standards (IAS) 38 as well as relevant International Financial Reporting Standards (IAS 38 exclusion) that are embedded within intangible assets. These have implications for Islamic financial assets with identifiable and measurable intangible components.

The study uses the qualitative research method by way of interviews followed by focus group discussions with professional accountants/accounting academics and Sharīʿah scholars/advisors from academia, the industry and regulatory bodies. Analysis of relevant literature is made to understand the subject matter and Sharīʿah-related issues.

The study observes that the accounting dimensions of tangible assets are generally consistent with Sharīʿah requirements. However, significant variation arises when the dimensions of intangible assets are represented in financial assets.

The paper presents an exploratory in-depth analysis within the context of intangible assets as specified in IAS 38.

The paper elucidates the comparative accounting dimensions and Sharīʿah requirements in reporting financial assets.

This paper aims to revisit the relationship between intangible capital and labour productivity growth using the largest, up-to-date macro database (2000–2015) available to corroborate the econometric findings of earlier work and to generate novel econometric evidence by accounting for times of crisis (2008–2013) and economic recovery (2014–2015).

To achieve these aims, this paper employs a cross-country growth accounting econometric estimation approach using the largest, up-to-date database available encompassing 16 EU countries over the period 2000–2015. The paper accounts for times of crisis (2008–2013) and of economic recovery (2014–2015). It separately estimates the contribution of three distinct dimensions of intangible capital: (1) computerized information, (2) innovative property and (3) economic competencies.

First, when accounting for intangibles, the paper finds that these intangibles have become the dominant source of labour productivity growth in the EU, explaining up to 66 percent of growth. Second, when accounting for times of crisis (2008–2013), in contrast to tangible capital, the paper detects a solid positive relationship between intangibles and labour productivity growth. Third, when accounting for the economic recovery (2014–2015), the paper finds a highly significant and remarkably strong relationship between intangible capital and labour productivity growth.

This paper corroborates the importance of intangibles for labour productivity growth and thereby underlines the necessity to incorporate intangibles into today's national accounting frameworks in order to correctly depict the levels of capital investment being made in European economies. These levels are significantly higher than those currently reflected in the official statistics.

The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of tourists' perceived value, satisfaction and behavioral intention on the development of Lipu Yi costume culture to promote the development of intangible cultural tourism and better construct a model of the influencing factors of Lipu Yi costumes in the development of intangible cultural heritage tourism.

The study site is the intangible cultural district of Panzhihua, Sichuan Province, China. This study examines the interrelationships between tourists' perceived value of experience, behavioral intention and satisfaction as the tourists relate to Lipu Yi costume and intangible cultural heritage tourism. A sample of 225 tourists who had visited Panzhihua at least once was selected for the study.

All seven of the survey's hypotheses were supported. Therefore, this study concludes that tourists' perceived value, satisfaction and behavioral intention directly affect the development of intangible cultural tourism and significantly positively impact the growth of Lipu Yi costumes culture. Descriptive analysis, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) investigation methods were used.

This paper analyzes tourists' perceived value of Lipu costume culture and tourists' satisfaction and behavioral intention during the tourism process. This study provides a more in-depth understanding of the relationship between Lipu Yi costume and non-heritage tourism factors. Practical methods and approaches are sought to further develop Lipu Yi costume non-heritage tourism.

High-growth firms generate a large share of new jobs and are thus the key drivers of innovation and industry dynamics. As the employees' education supports innovation and productivity, this article hypothesizes that employee competences explain high growth.

The study approaches this by examining intangible capital and specialized knowledge to evaluate how these characteristics support the probability of becoming a high-growth firm. The estimation uses linked employer–employee data from Danish registers from 2005 to 2013.

As the authors measure high growth with the size-neutral Birch index, they can examine the determinants of high growth across different firm size classes. The findings imply that intangible capital relates positively to the firm's high growth.

Previous research on high-growth firms is concentrated on the owners’ education. This article broadens to the high education of all employees and accounts for the employees’ occupation and capitalization of knowledge with intangible capital.