A New Challenge Of The Strategic Management: The Assessment Of Intellectual Capital Using The Balanced Scorecard

The increasingly ample orientation of the companies towards the intellectual capital is based on the rediscovery of this resource with (almost) unlimited potential, generating economic benefits for a company and a real source for performance. The latter part, related to performance, is the one which benefits most of the interest of managers, because it combines the accounting figures with the information related to intellectual capital, in this way establishing a relation between accounting, the value of the intellectual capital, the decisions made, based on the two, and, finally, the company's business strategy. This paper aims to present, from a critical perspective, the balanced scorecard (BSC), adapted to the assessment of intellectual capital, in order to help the decision making process. Given its flexible nature, this instrument can be used to focus the strategy of a company regarding its intellectual capital, taking into considerations the various organizational conditions that can modify indicators in different ways. In the same time, the BSC is an internal instrument and is mainly adapted to the specific conditions in each company, facts which make practical approaches difficult to compare. In these conditions, the main limitation is that the paper is primarily a theoretical study and therefore it is not certain that in practical situations companies will necessarily adopt the theoretical perspectives which characterize both the balance scorecard and the intellectual capital.