The creation and destruction of value: the intellectual capital cycles

One of the main levers to create value is generally considered to be Intellectual Capital (IC). Several scholars have tried to map the value creation process, i.e. how IC contributes to the increase of a company’s wealth. Usually this is done making reference to the interactions between human (HC), structural (SC), relational (RC) and financial capital (FC), where financial capital is assumed as the output of the process (Bjurström and Roberts, 2007; Marr, et al., 2004; Mouritsen, et al., 2001). In a recent study, Murty and Mouritsen (2011) argue that financial capital is not only the output of the IC value creation process but also the input. This creates something that can be called a “creation cycle”. Over all, it seems that the IC value creation process tend to be perceived as a fluid virtuous cycle. The recent financial crises have challenged several accounting concepts and methods (e.g. Barth and Landsman, 2010; Humphrey, et al., 2011; Magnan and Markarian, 2011). Some of the evidences that make the creation cycle questionable are the negative financial performance of most of the companies and the fact that the difference between market value and book value, often used as a proxy of IC value, is negative in several cases. This situation offers the opportunity to investigate how IC can lead to the destruction value, i.e. to analyse the “destruction cycle”. In fact, while the value creation process is object of several studies, the deterioration of the firm performance tends to be left out from discussions and consequently it seems to be not well understood. In light of these considerations, the aim of this paper is to analyse how IC is perceived to contribute to the value creation and destruction processes in order to understand if they are identical or if they have different developments. The main findings are the followings. First, IC and FC, and vice versa, are not perceived as tightly related from an input-output perspective. Second, the idea of the cross-sectional models have no complete correspondence in practice: the collected maps lack of the linearity of the cause-and-effect relationships often assumed between HC, SC, RC and FC. Moreover, it seems that not all the three IC components, i.e. HC, SC and RC, are perceived as co-dependent and tightly bundled together. Third, value creation and value destruction cycles do not have a complete correspondence but follows different paths of same paths but with different intensity. Forth, a case shows that while the positive cycle is known, the negative one is not discussed and consequently not perceived. In summary, in order to understand how IC works it appears to be of interest to map and discuss also the effects of a reduction of IC and not only of its increase.