ABSTRACT
Intellectual capital (IC) has grown as a central and strategic resource, both at the national (Lin and Edvinsson 2010; Seleim and Bontis 2013) and organizational level (Wang 2008; Zéghal and Maaloul 2010; Edvinsson 2013; Mention and Bontis 2013). For instance, in the wake of the recent global financial turmoil, countries with a higher amount of national IC recorded quicker recovery from the recent financial meltdown (Lin et al. 2013). At the organizational level, it had been preliminarily suggested that mobilizing IC resources could have mitigated the extent of the financial turmoil, with IC having “the potential to be the deciding factor in surviving difficult market conditions” (Henry 2013, 98). Evidently, the share price of a firm is largely determined by its IC resources. For instance, Edvinsson (2013) in his reflections from 21 years of IC practice and theory, demonstrates how Apple, a firm of huge IC resources and few physical assets, became the most valuable company in human history, with a market value of more than $U.S. 600 billion in August 2012. In the knowledge-based economy, there are a plethora of similar examples, such as Nokia, Google, Samsung and many more, that create value principally from intangible resources.
