Annals of the University of Oradea: Economic Science (Dec 2011)
COMPARING EXPERIENCES IN REPORTING INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL IN UNIVERSITIES
Abstract
The paper focuses on the intellectual capital (IC) report in universities, a relevant theme actually for the growing interest in applying an IC approach in managing universities. The paper compares the experiences in reporting IC of two different university institutions, the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and the Austrian Universities, to highlight pros and cons of the two different IC models employed. In order to compare these two experiences, firstly we analyzed, through a literature review, the state-of-the-art in measuring and reporting IC, then we focus on the IC measurement models used as framework by the two institution, finally we turned our attention to the IC reports issued by the two universities. Both experiences presented refer to advanced IC measurement models, but both suffer of some limits in applying the models in practice. Like all measurement and management systems that deal with knowledge-based processes, Austrian and UAM's IC reports face the methodological problems of measuring non-physical processes and outputs. In detail, Austrian IC reports lack of qualitative indicators, UAM's IC report lacks of efficiency-related and activities-related indicators.The main research limit is that the theoretical comparison has been carried out on two experiences, due to the lack of awareness of IC relevance in managing universities. The establishment of an ad hoc IC measurement model for universities could have both internal and external benefits. As regards the policy implications, Government, ranking universities by their IC, can get information about their strengths and weaknesses and using it to reallocate resources. This study contributes to broaden the research community'aas understanding about a relevant management (internal) and communication (external) universities tool, the IC report, through the examination of two real life European universities experiences in disclosing intangibles. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that focuses on comparing the two best university practices in reporting IC.
