Exploration in intellectual capital practice: A knowledge management perspective

Historically, Intellectual Capital (IC) has drawn the attention of researchers and practitioners as a new framework to assess the new competitiveness of firms and organizations in the knowledge economy. The enthusiasm dies down gradually as either the method is considered to be too general as compared with other performance measurement tools or non-mandatory as compared to other orthodox accounting methods that are already in place. This chapter links the professional IC management practices to a framework of Knowledge Management (KM) process to identify new methods and approaches. An intellectual capital management reference model is put forward to link the practice of intellectual capital and primary knowledge management functions. Three examples are selected to enrich the methodological scope and applications of IC practices. These include open elicitation of IC value tree and IC strategy map, mapping value, activity, and knowledge of unstructured business process and knowledge mining, and discovery of intellectual capital from unstructured information.