Intellectual capital: its understanding and its impacts on the performance of large brazilian companies

Abstract

The issue of Intellectual Capital is emerging and raising a discussion about its relevance to the wealth of organizations. Knowledge is accepted as an economic resource that imposes new paradigms on the evaluation of human beings and on the evaluation of companies, for such knowledge has produced intangible benefits that alter their value. The aggregate of such intangible elements has been named Intellectual Capital. This paper examines whether the understanding of the concept of Intellectual Capital by managers has an influence on the economic and financial performance of large Brazilian corporations. The work is based on a sample of 30 companies selected from the industrial, commercial and services sectors. The data were treated through the qualitative (content analysis) and quantitative (cluster analysis and correlation/association analysis) methods. The study concludes that corporate managers understand the concept of Intellectual Capital as it is presented in the literature and that investments have been made in the elements that identify Intellectual Capital. The understanding of the concept has indirectly influenced the performance of the selected companies through actions of investment in human resources. The paper also identifies a gap to be filled by Managerial Accounting in order to provide the information needed for an adequate management of the investments made in Intellectual Capital. The managers who were interviewed are willing to implement in their companies a model designed to evaluate the return on investments made in Intellectual Capital or simply Intellectual Asset(s).

Key words: intellectual capital, performance, intangibles assets.