مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد چگونگی هدایت سرمایه فکری به سمت نوآوری برتر – امرالد 2017

In the past decade, organizations have strived to improve innovation capabilities, as innovation drives market competitiveness in today’s rapidly changing environment (Ferraresi et al., 2012). To be more effective in innovation, organizations have to be focused on how they manage intangibles. Intellectual capital (IC) as a bundle of intangibles is a critical resource for firm performance and firm ability to innovate, create and sustain competitive advantage (Edvinsson and Malone, 1997; Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998). However, IC is a static resource that does not operate in a vacuum and independent of the management context (Wang et al., 2016; Kianto et al., 2014). Knowledge management (KM) should put IC as a resource into action to produce value and superior firm performance. Furthermore, KM needs to relate with business strategy (Heisig et al., 2016) to be focused on distinctive knowledge-based competences (resources and abilities) and to fully utilize knowledge-based capacities (Grant, 1996; Zack, 1999b; Inkinen, 2016; Inkinen et al., 2015). From a strategic perspective, KM refers to strategic decisions that facilitate creation, sharing and transfer, storage and protection and application of the company’s knowledge base (Zack, 1999b), as well as enhance firm’s ability to gain and sustain a competitive advantage (Davenport and Prusak, 1998; Heisig et al., 2016). IC and KM are two important streams of research addressing knowledge-based issues in organizations (Grant, 1996; Kianto et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2016; Giacosa et al., 2017). IC literature explores intangibles from a static perspective – as a stock of intangible resources – whereas KM literature focuses on managerial activities for dealing with organizational intangibles (Kianto et al., 2014). While IC emphasizes knowledge-based resources, their nature and different forms, KM mainly concentrates on knowledge-based processes and activities for doing what is needed to use IC effectively and efficiently in the value creation processes (Hsu and Sabherwal, 2012; Wiig, 1997; Kianto et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2016). IC literature considers intangibles as passive assets and the stock of knowledge resources (Stewart, 1997; Inkinen, 2015), and KM represents processes to leverage and get the most out of knowledge stocks (Wang et al., 2016; Wiig, 1997). However, the analysis of such knowledge resources and management processes is not an easy task. For instance, Allee (2008) suggested that the analysis of value creation from intangibles is a great challenge. That is because there may exist unique configurations of intangibles and their specific interactions that play a role in the value creation process. So far, no consensus has been reached on how particular IC components are related to firm performance (Wang et al., 2016) and which of these components are the most valuable. Some empirical studies find that all components of IC, e.g. human capital (HC), structural capital (SC) and relational capital (RC), help enhance firm performance (Wang et al., 2014; Sharabati et al., 2010), while others argue that only a selected few IC components are positively associated with firm performance (Ling, 2013; Dumay et al., 2013; Inkinen, 2015, Andreeva and Garanina, 2016; Cabrilo et al., in press; Hsu and Fang, 2009). Wang et al. (2016) go even further by exploring the fit between IC components and KM strategy and its impacts on firm performance to find ideal IC profiles for certain types of KM strategies. Their findings emphasize the importance in exploring IC components individually and confirming that the better the fit of an organization’s IC is to its KM strategy type, the better the operational and financial performance the company can achieve. This indicates the complexity researchers face in empirically capturing those associations.