Guess who’s coming to dinner: the case of IC reporting in Italy

In the last 2 decades, intellectual capital (IC) reporting has been promoted with the idea that it can lead to internal (managerial) and external (disclosure) benefits. Studies have been conducted to understand whether and how reporting IC can help to realize the benefits usually attributed to it and, consequently, which are the levers and the obstacles that may influence the fate of IC reports. While technical and procedural barriers have been thoroughly investigated, the relevance of specific actors in influencing the adoption of IC Reports seems to be overlooked. The aim of this paper is to investigate what actors influence the adoption and the fate of an IC report and how they influence these reports. In other words, the paper focuses on the institutionalization or (non) institutionalization of IC practices. In order to achieve this objective, the results of an exploratory field study conducted through semi-structured interviews referred to Italian companies that adopted an IC report will be presented. The main finding of this study is that, in an IC reporting project, the political, technical, and cultural agents, i.e. the project leaders, the project sponsors and the external partners (consultants, researchers, etc.), are not only relevant but they must coexist and cooperate over time. When one of the agents is missing the IC project tends to fail, unless the agent’s skills are transferred to another agent, either an already existing or a new one. In this case, the original development trajectory of the project may change.