CHALLENGES OF THE INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL FROM A MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE

The extensive framework which shows connections between intellectual capital and other concepts such as management of human resources, knowledge management, learning organizations, strategic management, places intellectual capital at the heart of the new management thinking that reflects on how organisational problems are foreseen and solved at present. In this new approach, the management of an organisation is no longer about managing the return from capital, but it is about recognising and making use of the organisational, structural resources and the knowledge of the staff. While IC marked the transition from the traditional approach in which financial capital was key to gaining wealth to an approach in which knowledge stood out as the main resource of an organisation, be it public, private or education-oriented, the interest in identification and reporting of IC has grown as several models were developed to help orient management decisions. Building on the early work of several scholars (Hermanson, 1964, Hekimian and Jones, 1967) who first tried to account for the worth of employees, several models have been proposed in time (Sveiby, 1997, Mouritsen 1998, Meer-Kooistra and Zijlstra, 2001), in the attempt to report on IC resources and turn IC management into a pillar of strategic management. As IC has become one of the concepts embraced even by higher education institutions from business along with strategic planning or total quality management (Leitner et al., 2016), the transfer of IC models to public institutions has posed several challenges in terms of performance, bureaucracy and the role of the public servant (Sousa et al., 2016). Against the multitude of IC reporting models, scholars agree that, for an institution that wishes to be connected to the demands of the society, IC management and IC reporting is a way to make a the activity of an organisation more transparent, visible and more efficient. The purpose of this article is to generalize the concept of intellectual capital and its role in the development of an organisation, private and public. The methods applied are the synthesis and analysis of academic research and publications.