Talk:Intellectual capital

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This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Arwaaliriani.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 00:35, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Relational capital vs goodwill
Under relational capital (which has no page yet) also customer base is mentioned. In my view, that does not belong to intellectual capital. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.212.223.190 (talk) 18:28, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

I think you missed
I think you missed the liberal economist view, von Hayek, Schumpeter, Pirole ecc. that is very sceptical of Intellectual Capital.

It seems like there was a gap between industrial economy and business lobbyists.

Who wants to bet
Who wants to bet that this gets hacked with a Stallmanic rant? A Rand rant?

Tolerance is appreciated - these critiques are welcome but please try to remember that outside fringe circles economics don't see Stallman or Rand as major contributors.

One way to approach those issues is that Stallman is big on the instructional value, and subordinating individual contribution to that, whereas Rand is the other way around, seeing all instructional value coming from the individual... but these are extreme views.

Ultimately, those views belong here - and *NOT* in the instructional capital or individual capital entries which are much less controversial notions than this.

Keeping this entry separate is one way to keep the rants away from the economics.

---

OK, this is as objective
OK, this is as objective as I can possibly make it. If someone wants to define "political economy" in a way that can take the heat off this entry, good, but there remains a distinct literature of intellectual capital - not wise to ignore it.

I mentioned most of the major theorists in this area. not clear if Lev's idea of "brand capital" deserves a separate article. An article outlining both Baruch Lev and Naomi Klein as "pro-brand" and "anti-brand" is probably worth writing. But their distinctions are critical to explaining how or why "intellectual" could exclude "social", as in this article, so it may become somewhat redundant. Klein objects to brand capital but not to intellectual capital - Shiva is more fundamental so she's covered here.

Gabora is very fundamental and actually making an argument relative to political economy itself - but is worth mentioning here only because the whole issue of "intellectual capital" existing or not is one of whether individuals and instructions can actually be traded off by any process of management, or always play quantitatively different roles...

Badly needs a good article on intellectual property law to explain just where this whole idea of a unified "intellectual capital" came from.

Human and structural capital as parts of intellectual capital
I'm curious why this article doesn't talk about the underpinnings of the intellectual capital concept. There is a link to the web site of Dr. Nick Bontis but there doesn't seem to be anything in the Wikipedia article about the research work that Bontis and others have done.

I'm also surprise that there is nothing about Skandia insurance and their efforts to pull together measurements of intellectual capital. The Skandia Navigator is an interesting tool.

There should at least be something about the two major components of intellectual capital, human capital or the knowledge and skills of the human beings in the organization which are theirs to take with them and structural capital or the infrastructure (facilities and business processes) which are owned by the organization.

See Intellectual Capital by Leif Edvinsson and Michael S. Malone

<-- I totally agree with you. The orginal authors seemed to be unaware of this important literature. I added some relevant references in, but haven't had the time to modify the page. Go ahead and make the changes!  LMackinnon 11:58, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Question
link title Does anyone know whether the website publishing Baruch Lev's book has proper permission to post his book online? If it does not, this link should be removed and reported to Wikipedia. --MrMMattson

Rethinking of microeconomics
"Baruch Lev documents "brand" as a new (seventh) form of capital. This seems to violate classical microeconomics basic model of the factors of production - and likely require major rethinking of microeconomics and political economy." - The claim that a major field of study which has garnered multiple Nobel Prizes ought to be torn down to its roots ought to have a citation. Wikipedia is not a soapbox.  Plasticup  T / C  13:47, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Editorial or Article
Much of this article in its current form seems more like a series of editorials on various topics rather than an encyclopaedic entry. There is quite a large body of academic work in this area that could be used to construct a less opinionated article. I am working on some related subjects and may be able to offer an alternative proposal for this article. This is not to claim that the current article does not contain some interesting discussion. Any thoughts? MikeHeffner (talk) 13:32, 6 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Anything of value (if anything) in this article is hidden within a mountain of Original Research. From structure to content this article does not communicate anything that makes sense. Karbinski (talk) 21:00, 6 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Given the prospect of a re-write, I'm going to promote this article from *blatant OR that should be deleted* to a stub. Karbinski (talk) 21:05, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

not a copyright infringement
During the European Conference on Intellectual Capital in April of 2009 I volunteerd to put some text on the Wikipedia site about the phenomenon IC. I took this from an EU project we worked on called SPICE (Sustainable Programme on Intellectual Capital). This is an EU text and so is free of any copyrights. I hope this clears things up. Don Ropes (talk) 15:41, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * According to, European Communities material is copyrighted. While they authorize reproduction with acknowledgment, license is not compatible that I can see with GFDL, which also requires allowance of modification. We need to verify either that this material is public domain or that it is released under a license that is fully compatible with GFDL and CC-BY-SA, that is allowing modification as well as reproduction. Can you help clarify this? --Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:25, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Lacking verification that this material is free for use, it has been removed. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 15:35, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed
One or more portions of this article duplicated other source(s). Infringing material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a license compatible with GFDL. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.) For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences or phrases. Accordingly, the material may be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 15:35, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

"Intellectual Capital" addition.
Good day,

I read the Intellectual capital article and I noticed that it defines Intellectual Capital as all intangible assets of an enterprise. However, revising the intangible assets of a typical enterprise I noted that there is one that is very important and it is not mentioned in this article. I am talking about information. While the article mentions "information systems", information alone is not considered. I am talking about:

1. Business information (e.g. management information, efficiency or productivity indicators)

2. Administrative information (e.g. accounting information, human resources information, transactions information)

3. Technical information (i.e. information not categorized as intellectual property but that still is part of the enterprise's systems operation; e.g. machinery’s operation manuals)

4. Regulatory information (i.e. laws and regulations information; while these are not generated by the enterprise they still are necessary for its correct operation)

Therefore, in my opinion, the Intellectual capital article should include, somewhere, somehow, these informational elements because they are intangible assets, too.

Best regards,

Luis R. Villegas H. Mexico.

LuisVillegas (talk) 03:12, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Publications list
I removed the huge list of publications. It seems to me that there is not much point in including a list of every publication on the subject in this article. If anything, I would suggest a very short list of works to be put in a "Further Reading" section. Although reading the other comments, improving the article would seem to come first. — Mr. Stradivarius  ( drop me a line ) 17:18, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Self-contradictory on scope of title term
Currently the lead says


 * Intellectual capital is the difference in value between tangible assets (physical and financial) and market value.[1][2] This contrasts with physical and financial forms of capital....

while the section "Classification" says


 * Intellectual capital is normally classified as follows: ... Structural capital includes such traditional things as buildings, ....

Two problems:

1. This is self-contradictory because it says first that physical assets are excluded and then that things such as buildings are included. The latter seems extremely implausible for something called intellectual capital.

2. In the first quoted passage above, liabilities are missing.

I'm going to correct point #2 right now. I'll make changes regarding point #1 soon, unless someone else familiar with the sources can fix it better first. The problem here concerns the concept of structural capital: if it really includes physical assets, then it's not a subset of intellectual capital but rather overlaps with it; on the other hand, maybe structural capital does not really include physical assets, in which case this assertion should be stripped from the last-quoted passage. Duoduoduo (talk) 16:49, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Actually I'm going to fix the other item right now too -- I can't find any source that includes physical capital in structural capital. Duoduoduo (talk) 17:18, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Measurements
I think the measurement section needs more information about the variety of methods out there that can be used to measure IC. I've added a brief sentence of a couple and hope to expand the section a little more. --Arwaaliriani (talk) 22:28, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

India Education Program course assignment
This article was the subject of an educational assignment supported by Wikipedia Ambassadors through the India Education Program.

The above message was substituted from by PrimeBOT (talk) on 19:53, 1 February 2023 (UTC)