Energy, Sustainability and Society (Feb 2019)
How to keep renewable energy enterprises to reach economic sustainable performance: from the views of intellectual capital and life cycle
Abstract
Abstract Background Intellectual capital can not only help companies to obtain sustainable competitive advantage, but also serve as a key factor in corporate performance improvement and value creation. For knowledge-intensive and technology-intensive renewable energy companies, the effective management of intellectual capital is particularly important. However, there is a huge gap between the book value of renewable energy companies and their market value. It will be difficult to establish the most appropriate development strategy for companies by evaluating the corporate performance only based on financial indicators. Therefore, studying the value creation effect of intellectual capital will not only make new energy companies pay more attention to the intellectual capital management, but also help renewable energy companies achieve sustainable corporate performance. Methods By choosing the listed renewable energy companies from 2010 to 2016, this paper conducts an empirical research based on the Ohlson model and use quantile regression to analyze the impacts of value-added intellectual coefficient (VAIC) on sustainable performance at different life cycle stages. Results The results confirm that increasing the VAIC creates value for enterprises. It also examines the effect of life cycle on this impact, and the result shows that it does not change the significant positive correlation with the economic sustainable performance at different life cycle quantiles. This paper also concludes that value-added human capital coefficient (VAHU) and value-added capital assets coefficient (VACA) are the most important component of intellectual capitals to economic sustainable performance at the growth stage, maturation stage, and decline stage. Conclusions Thus, it is suggested that renewable energy enterprises should emphasize on corporate intellectual capital management activities and design intellectual capital management solutions specifically for a certain life cycle stage.
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