Intellectual capital
Definition
A model used for describing organizational competency and consists of human, structural and relational capital, or the sum of all the intellectual material, such as knowledge, information, intellectual property, experience, which can be put to use to create wealth
Description
Intellectual capital can be seen as a representation of organizational competency. Here it is described in terms of human, structural and relational capital. The model described in Fig 1 is based on an intellectual capital model presented in Ref [1].
Human capital is the knowledge and competencies embedded in people and groups. It is the type of capital that people take with them when they leave the office.
Structural capital consists of the policies, formal and informal processes, data and information owned by the organization, culture, communities and networks. To emphasize the different nature of the items under structural capital, it has been divided into formal and informal part.
Relational capital is the external relationships the organisation has with other organisations and individuals. This can include e.g. the relationships between an operating organisation and the vendor or the relationships the organisation has with its retired experts.
The components of organizational competency are not independent of each other. Informal structural capital includes knowledge processes which affect human capital. The processes for managing human capital e.g. qualification requirements are part of the formal structural capital. Relational capital affects structural capital via information transfer from other organizations, e.g. maintaining the design bases information and transferring it from design organisations to the operating organisation. Relational capital can also increase human capital e.g. via cross-organizational networks.
The concept of intellectual capital focuses manager's attention on the points of knowledge accumulation - people and internal and external processes /technologies. Company intellectual capital according to the model of L. Edvinsson [2] highlights human capital, and organizational and customer capitals. Human capital is considered as the real and potential intellectual abilitiesand the relevant practical skills of company employees. Structural capital includes customer and organizational capital. Customer assets are a value of the relationships with customers (within the context of nuclear power relashionships with the stakeholders in general should be viewed as customers assets in the broader sense).Organizational capital is devided into innovation capital (e.g. patents, licence agreements, trademarks, ideas) and process capital, which represents the company's infrastructure (IT, business processes), i.e. capital materialized in effective internal business processes of the company. The effectiveness assessment of the knowledge management processes is conducted in terms of intellectual capital. In general, the purpose of measuring of the intellectual capital at the company level is the timely provision of qualitative and relible information on the company's sustainability towards all stakeholders (both within and outside the company) [3].
References
[1] Carson, E., Ranzijn, R., Winefield, A., Marsden, H., Intellectual capital – Mapping employee and work group attributes, Intellectual Capital, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 443-463 (2004);
[2] Edvinsson L.- Corporate Longitute - Navigating the Knowledge Economy, Bookhouse/Pearson, Stockholm/London (2002);
[3] Rosatom - Rosatom Shares the Knowledge, Knowledge Management in the HI-Tech companies, pp30, RKM 2012, Vienna (2014)
