Intellectual Capital scores highly on the agenda of practicing managers and academics as they all try to disentangle such problems as how to identify and measure intellectual capital and how to value and report intangibles and invisible assets. Few people doubt the importance of measuring, managing, and reporting intangibles such as Intellectual Capital and most practitioners and scholars are in agreement that intangible assets such as knowledge, brand, relationships, organizational culture, and intellectual property are the primary drivers of competitiveness in today"s global economy. Governments, research organizations, and private corporations are sponsoring projects to develop the area of intangible assets. Different tools are being developed to handle intangibles. such as strategic approaches like the business scorecard or management frameworks, or financial perspectives dealing with real options or value based approaches. A significant problem people face when they first delve into this area is that the definitions are not clear and neither are the boundaries. This is, to a large extent, due to the multidimensional nature of the topic. This issue is further complicated by the specialized nature of academic research. The result is little cross-fertilization of ideas and concepts. Thus, although the concept of intellectual capital is truly multidisciplinary, there is little agreement and significant confusion concerning its nature, available tools, their usage, as well as the extent to which such tools are applied in organizations. Perspectives on Intellectual Capital is aimed at addressing exactly these challenges. First, it will bridge the disciplinary gaps and facilitate knowledge transfer across disciplines. Secondly, it will provide an introduction to intangibles for those new to the field. The book offers functional perspectives and therefore a truly comprehensive understanding of what intellectual capital is, what it stands for, what is "state of the art" in each discipline and where it will go in the future. The book features views on intellectual capital from an accounting, strategy, marketing, human resource management, operations management, information systems, and economics position. It also offers interdisciplinary views on intellectual capital form the perspectives of public policy, knowledge management and epistemology. The final part of the book will extract the key trends and try to create bridges across disciplines in order to open up trajectories for future developments, learning, and practice. The book is structured methodologically, designed to provide a holistic understanding of the field. The structure of each chapter will start with an explanation and a review of the background and development of intellectual capital in relation to the discipline being discussed. It will cover a historic review in order to explore the triggers and reasons why intangibles have become important and above all it will provide definitions and clarify the language used to describe intellectual capital. This part will address the key believes and theoretical foundations on which views on intellectual capital are based. Each chapter will then outline the evolution of theoretical concepts and will give the reader an insight into which theoretical tools and techniques have been developed to manage, measure, or report intangibles. It is intended to demonstrate the status quo and theoretical diversity. The second part is then contrasted with the extent to which these tools and techniques are used by in practice. It will include a selection of best practice examples of how real organizations apply these tools and techniques. This will uncover possible gaps between theory and practice. We expect different gaps for different disciplines, in some theory will lead practice whereas in others theory might lag practice. In this way the reader will see potential for both transfer of theoretical concepts into practice as well as for grounding practical concepts into theory. The final part of each chapter will look to the future. It will try to identify how mature the theme is in each of the disciplinary views and discuss how intellectual capital might develop. In this, the authors seek to identify the major challenges that will need to be addressed in the future and give an outline of possible barriers and enablers.
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