ABSTRACT
In the past decade, the study of IAs has received increasing attention from scholars of management and accounting science, recognising that immater ial assets yield crit ical returns for firms, as they represent a major source of value cre ation. Whilst the accounting liter at ure has mostly elaborated on the issue of external fin an cial reporting of intan gible assets, defining them as “a non-physical source of expected future bene fits” (Abernethy et al., 2003: 17), business strat egy scholars have focused on conceptual frameworks for identi fying, collecting and analysing intan gibles for in ternal management purposes, defining IAs as “resources that are not vis ible in the balance sheet, but that add value to the enterprise” (Edvinsson, 1997: 322). Although different approaches have focused on different value com pon ents, human resources, organ isa tional features and the abil ity to network have
commonly been highlighted as crit ical features to create value.3 One of the most prominent and clearest efforts to understand intan gible assets was proposed by Edvinsson and Malone (1997) in the Skandia Navigator Project,4 which introduced the concept of intellectual capital and defined it as the combination of human capital and structural capital. Whilst the former refers to the know ledge embodied in em ployees, the latter comprises two subcat egor ies: customer or relational capital, which refers to know ledge linked to external relationships of the firm; and organ isa tional capital, which refers to the structures that are able to transform indi vidual know-how in a col lect ive ad vant age for the whole firm. Subsequent con tri bu tions have de veloped com par able concepts: for instance, Lev (2001) includes products and ser vices, customer relations, human resources and organ isa tional capital in his tax onomy of intan gibles; Kaplan and Norton (2004), from a business strat egy per spect ive, suggest three sets of IAs based on human capital, in forma tion capital (the com pany’s databases, in forma tion systems and tech no logy structure) and organ isa tional capital; Daum (2003), building on these con tri bu tions, de velops a quadripartite tax onomy of IAs composed of human capital, structural capital, customer capital, and business partner and eco nomic web capital. To sum up, a broad spectrum of definitions and taxonomies has arisen in the accounting and management liter at ure. From these, three essential IAs can be commonly identified: human, organ isa tional and network capital. These intangible assets are highly com plement ary – espe cially the latter two, as they are intrinsically linked and could be jointly referred to as structural capital. Whilst the con tri bu tions reviewed here have focused on IAs as a source of value creation, in this research we will use the same concepts to ana lyse the very nature of the in nova tion pro cess, focusing on the role that IAs play in sup porting the innov at ive capa city of MNEs.
