The Impact of Investments in Intangible Assets and Implications on SMEs’ Performance. A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Investments in intangible assets have become a strategic approach that has led to numerous benefits and boosts the firms’ performance. Academics have studied the process, but there is no complete picture of how intangible resources impact SMEs’ performance, this being the main motivation of the paper. The methodology applied is a systematic literature review and it consisted in applying a pre-selected criterion for retrieving the articles from the Web of Science database. The analysis showed that the impact of investments in intangible assets and implications on SMEs existing literature can be divided into six general lines of research. Scholars can use the study as a starting point to fill in research gaps relating to the relationship between intangible assets and SMEs’ performance, while practitioners can use the data to determine the effects of this type of investment and how to use efficiently SMEs’ resources.

Keywords

• intangible assets
• systematic literature review
• smes
• performance
• intangible resources