Guest editorial

Citation

Bontis, N. and Bart, C.K. (2009), "Guest editorial", Journal of Intellectual Capital, Vol. 10 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jic.2009.25010aaa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Intellectual Capital, Volume 10, Issue 1

The papers in this Special Issue highlight some the most cutting edge research in the field of intellectual capital as it pertains to exploiting intangible assets. All of the selected papers in this issue deal with the multi-faceted perspective of knowledge-based assets at the individual, firm, and national levels. As a collection, this issue sets the groundwork for many years of future hypothesis development and testing. The authors in this Special Issue examine intangible asset management from a variety of functional perspectives and various international contexts. There are studies and authors included from Austria, Canada, Denmark, India, Ireland, Lebanon, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the UK the USA.

The first paper, by Alexander Serenko, Nick Bontis and Joshua Grant, presents a scientometric analysis of the proceedings of the McMaster World Congress on the Management of Intellectual Capital and Innovation for the 1996-2008 period. The objective of this analysis is to better understand the evolution and identity of the discipline. The authors find a variety of valuable insights on the state and development of the KM/IC (knowledge management and intellectual capital) discipline and shed some light on its identity.

Josune Sáenz, Nekane Aramburu and Olga Rivera empirically test the degree of influence of different knowledge-sharing mechanisms on the innovation capability of firms. Using structural equation modelling, the focus of their research was Spanish manufacturing firms with more than 50 employees. The authors conclude that certain knowledge-sharing mechanisms do in fact enhance the innovative capability of firms.

In his empirical examination of 88 Irish firms, Peter Cleary proposes that management accounting is most appropriately situated as an element of a firm’s structural capital. Statistical results show support for the hypothesis that management accounting information does positively influence structural capital.

Causal models have been used in recent intellectual capital research studies to better understand the various outcomes of antecedent configurations of intangible asset components. The purpose of this study is to replicate and extend prior research results within a new financial services sub-sector. Nick Bontis and Alexander Serenko analyze the results from surveying 396 employees from ten credit unions across Canada.

The fifth article in this Special Issue is written by George Tovstiga and Ekaterina Tulugurova. This research study examines and compares the competitive impact of intellectual capital on enterprise performance in small innovative enterprises situated in four geographical regions:

1. 1.

   St Petersburg in the Russian Federation;

2. 2.

   the Black Forest region of Germany;

3. 3.

   the Medicon Valley, situated between Copenhagen in Denmark and Malmo in Sweden; and

4. 4.

   Silicon Valley in the USA.

The effective management and exploitation of intangible assets depends upon appropriate organizational structures and characteristics. Robert Isaac, Irene Herremans and Theresa Kline argue that certain structural, cultural, and climate characteristics will lead to more effective intellectual capital management. They integrate perspectives from a variety of literatures including organic environments, trust, participative decision-making, and creative renewal processes.

Dimitris Karagiannis, Martin Nemetz and Franz Bayer develop the ICRB (intellectual capital report benchmarking) method and apply it to BOC IS GmbH, which is an Austrian consulting and software company specialising in IT-based management solutions. Their study provides several practical implications for managers, employees, external stakeholders, experts and academics regarding how to achieve comparable and expressive intellectual capital reports.

Harjinder Singh Deol reviews a case study of the Indian banking industry. He considers how different banks responded to deregulation and industry reforms in terms of developing and exploiting their intangible assets. He finds that government-, private- and foreign-owned banks used and developed different elements of intellectual capital (structural, human and relational capital) in response to the change in their strategic environment due to the reforms. These responses appear to be contingent on firm history and initial endowments.

The ninth paper in this Special Issue is written by Christopher Bart, Mark Baetz and Mark Pancer. The purpose of their study is to explore how an employee volunteer program (EVP) as one aspect of responsible corporate citizenship (typically expressed in a mission statement) can influence the relationships among a firm, its employees and its community. A pedagogical approach used in the educational sector known as “community service-learning” was used as the basis for analyzing the experiences of 12 first-time volunteering employees.

Jamal Nazari, Irene Herremans, Robert Isaac, Armond Manassian and Theresa Kline investigate how organizational characteristics were related to intellectual capital and how these variables were different between Canadian and Middle East contexts. Survey results yielded responses from 205 individuals (161 from Canada, 44 from the Middle East). The authors uncovered significant differences in all organizational characteristics and intellectual management between Canada and the Middle East.

Recent research on intra-organizational knowledge-transfer shows that new capability development within multinational corporations shifts from parent companies to foreign subsidiaries. This study by Andreas Schotter and Nick Bontis identifies antecedents and barriers for reverse capability-transfer in multinational corporations.

In the final article in this Special Issue, Ahmed Seleim and Nick Bontis investigate the relationship between the Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness (GLOBE) project and corruption. To measure culture and corruption, they use the GLOBE national cultural dimensions of values and practices and the corruption perception index (CPI). The results provide empirical support for the influence of uncertainty avoidance values, human orientation practices, and individual collectivism practices on the level of corruption after controlling for economic and human development, which, in turn, adds to the efforts to build a general theory of the culture perspective of corruption.

We would like to acknowledge the support of three student volunteers who helped in the processing and administration of several hundred papers that led to this Special Issue: Joshua Grant, Jaime Mistry and Mona Ahmad. We also invite you all to participate at the McMaster World Congress in the future. Please be sure to visit our website at http://worldcongress.mcmaster.ca for further information.

Nick Bontis, Christopher K. BartManagement of Innovation and Technology Research Centre, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada