Intellectual Capital: Realizing Your Company's True Value by Finding Its Hidden Brainpower - Hardcover

Edvinsson, Leif; Malone, Michael 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

About the Author

Leif Edvinsson is Corporate Director of Intellectual Capital at Skandia AFS of Stockholm, Sweden. He is the world's leading expert on Intellectual Capital.

Michael S. Malone is the author of numerous books on business and high technology, including The Virtual Corporation. He has been a columnist for the New York Times and is currently a contributing editor to Forbes ASAP and Upside magazines.

From the Back Cover

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.

Reviews

It has always been recognized that many of a company's assets--good will, reputation, and patent rights--are intangible. In today's knowledge-based economy, perhaps the most important asset of all is an intangible the authors call "intellectual capital," but traditional accounting systems are not designed to set values on skills, knowledge, and information. Edvinsson is director of intellectual capital for Stockholm-based Skandia Group, a large financial services company. He has pioneered the effort to account for intellectual capital by releasing an annual report on Skandia's knowledge assets. Here Malone, who was coauthor of the acclaimed Virtual Corporation (1992), and Edvinsson distinguish the two subgroups of intellectual capital: structural capital, such as business partnerships or customer loyalty, and human capital, such as employees' key competencies. They argue why it is so important to measure these assets and provide guidance to do so. While many new books only promise groundbreaking ideas, these authors actually deliver! David Rouse

The manager of intellectual capital for Sweden's Skandia Group, Edvinsson advocates "intellectual capital reporting" as a new type of accounting tool to measure the value contained in the structural and human capital of an organization. (LJ 4/1/97)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0887308414
• ISBN 13: 9780887308413
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240