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Company value creation: does the structure of intellectual capital matter?
Objectives
According to the framework of knowledge economy, production and management of knowledge are key aspects of firm’s activity nowadays. Intellectual capital (IC) is the crucial factor for company survival in the market. Therefore it is vital to realize the way that this capital helps to create firm value. The purpose of this study is to test empirically one aspect of the relationship between intellectual capital components and business performance – the influence of intellectual capital structure on process of firm’s value added creation.
Data
In order to analyze the process of intellectual capital transformation into the company value, the balanced panel data were collected. The sample consists of 64 British firms in 6 industries: retail and wholesale trade, machinery manufacture, chemicals manufacture, transport and telecommunications, oil extraction and producing. The panel includes five years: from 2005 to 2009. In order to obtain comprehensive data of chosen companies we used Amadeus Database (Bureau Van Dijk) as like as information from companies’ websites.
Methods
As far as there is no singular method of measuring value added by intellectual capital, we used five the most common methods: EVATM, MVATM, FGVTM, VAICTM, P/B ratio. We also used 14 variables as proxies for intellectual capital components.
The models are estimated with pooled cross-sectional OLS method.
Results
Most strongly influence of the intellectual assets structure is reflected in VAIC and FGV. At the same time, EVA and P/B ratio have weak or not significant relationship with the structure of the intellectual assets portfolio.
It should also be noted that models with human capital proxy in the denominator show a significant positive dependency between a ratio of the intellectual capital components and value added.
Moreover consideration of the industry factor changes the results only slightly.
Conclusions
The present study advances our understanding of how to manage knowledge-related resources and contributes to effective investment management. The results confirm that structure of intellectual assets has quite stable linear effect on the value added created by the company. The effect is observed both in the short and long term period. Consequently, management should consider not only an accumulated volume of intellectual capital, but also the ratio between these components in order to increase company value.