Intellectual capital: from intangible assets to fitness landscapes

Abstract

Intellectual Capital (IC) has been proposed by Edvinsson and Malone (Intellectual capital, Harper, 1997) as a technique for quantifying a company's intangible assets. A careful analysis can result in hundreds of variables, and extracting knowledge from these measurements can be difficult. We introduce a knowledge management technique called IC mapping that attempts to synthesize this data into a fitness landscape. Using the map, managers can query the surrounding landscape, view the company's trajectory across the landscape, and calculate what parameters need to be changed to reach new locations. IC mapping provides a novel knowledge management tool for understanding, managing, and representing a company's intangible knowledge assets.