Intellectual Capital - Hardcover

Edvinsson, Leif; Malone, Michale S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0887308414 ISBN 13: 9780887308413

Publisher: Harper Business, 1997

Synopsis

One of the greatest challenges facing any business today is the gap between its balance sheet and its market valuation. This gap, representing the bulk of a company's true value, consists of indirect assets -- organizational knowledge, customer satisfaction, product innovation, employee morale, patents, and trademarks -- that never appear in its financial reports.

Only in the last few years have companies and academics around the world tackled the challenge of measuring this "Intellectual Capital." And no company has taken IC measurement as far as the Swedish financial services company Skandia, which in 1995 published the world's first IC annual report. The executive who led the team, the first-ever director of Intellectual Capital, was Leif Edvinsson.

Now Edvinsson has teamed up with noted business author Michael S. Malone to write the first book that explains the workings of IC measurement and its usefulness to the modern corporation. Intellectual Capital is also the first book ever to present a universal IC measurement and reporting system.

And that's only the beginning. The authors also show how IC measurement can be used in any organization, including government agencies and nonprofit institutions; they present a simple new measure as a yardstick to compare the IC value and efficiency of different organizations; and finally, they propose a new kind of IC "stock market" exchange.

Intellectual Capital will transform the nature of doing business by establishing the real value of enterprises for those who manage them, work in them, and invest in them. The result will be a revolutionary transformation of the modern economy.

Highly readable and engaging, Intellectual Capital will prove to be one of the landmark business books of this decade.

About this title

Synopsis:

Intellectual capital is a phrase covering corporate brainpower, information technology, and relationships with customers and suppliers, all of which influence a company's ability to make money. They are all factors which tend to get overlooked because they are intangible and do not show up on a balance sheet. Yet without them, a good company can founder. This guide shows how to measure, manage and grow these hidden values as if they were money and takes accounting to a new level. It establishes the need for identifying hidden assets, develops principles for intellectual accounting, explains the metrics, applies the model with real examples and provides an action plan for managing development and growth of intellectual capital.

About the Author:

Leif Edvinsson is Corporate Director of Intellectual Capital at Skandia AFS of Stockholm, Sweden.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0887308414
• ISBN 13: 9780887308413
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256