ABSTRACT
The focus of wealth creation in developed countries has shifted increasingly from mass production to a knowledge economy, where the key drivers of economic growth are ever more intangible. The value-creating mechanisms of knowledge capital are profoundly different from those in the manufacturing era. The growing interest in intangibles lies in the belief that these are a crucial source of future wealth creation in business (Stewart 1997). The empirical evidence that companies with the greatest share of intangible-driven earnings perform better than others in the long term is also compelling (Gu and Lev 2002). Thus, it is an important challenge—both from a practical and an academic perspective—to recognize knowledge as an economic driver, to understand its behavior and to be able to measure its economic impact.
