Knowledge and Trust Issues for Intellectual Capital Measurement

Trust in intellectual capital has become an increasingly important factor. External trust such as trust between business and customer(B to B and B to C), business and supplier, and trust between customer to customer, also internal trust such as trust between employees vertically and horizontally is seen as crucial to the expansion of intellectual capital in a business. Although there is an interest in measuring and reporting the relationship between intellectual capital and business performance and some measurement models have been proposed, in most of these models such as BSC, Skandia, IC audit, Intangible asset monitor, MVA and EVA, Knowledge and an asset produced by the knowledge are assumed as the fundamental sources of wealth and the role of trust has not been investigated. The concept of trust indicates business component faith to the shared knowledge between them. The key to success in business is obtaining and maintaining the trust (internal and external) of the participants in the markets. Trust also affects on knowledge sharing and in order to increase knowledge sharing, the participants must have good faith to the shared knowledge resources. Otherwise, participants are more likely to share knowledge with the business competitors. In this paper, we extend the value of intellectual capital from the knowledge to "knowledge and trust" as the two important variables in intellectual capital. Sustainable business performance will be discussed and demonstrated the platform of this sustainability can be created by the knowledge and trust. Additionally, most current intellectual capital measurement models are assessing the business performance in static environment. However, the intellectual assets consist mainly of dynamic elements. Knowledge and trust are dynamic elements and we should discuss them in a dynamic environment and in a specific time slot. Therefore, in this paper variables are analysed in dynamic modelling systems. Also, in current business performance models most of the data resources are internal where external data resources are also important. We point out in this paper that improving external variables such as trust within customers can affect on business performance.