Measurement of intellectual capital

Abstract

The economy has greatly evolved and changed in the past decades and still evolving. Companies that used to prioritize tangible assets as the only source of value creation, are now focusing on intangible assets to gain and maintain a significant competitive advantage. The very thing that has stimulated the need of finding methods and techniques to measure this Intellectual capital. From this matter, the purpose of this paper is to present de different methods of measuring intellectual capital. These methods are categorized in four groups:

Direct Intellectual Capital methods (DIC) that evaluate intangible assets through the identification of each of its components, Market Capitalization methods (MCM) that use total market value to assess the value of intellectual capital, Return On Assets methods (ROA) and Scorecard Methods (SC). Each group is composed of multiple methods.