INTELLECUTAL CAPITAL AND COMPETITIVENESS: GUIDELINES FOR POLICY

Background Whether termed intellectual capital, knowledge management, or something else, the practice of managing an institution's knowledge base has received increasing attention in recent years. After some of the highly publicized downsizings of the late eighties and early nineties, a number of organizations discovered that an enormous amount of institutional memory and unique knowledge was walking out the door with exiting employees. Further, the nineties have seen tremendous growth in firms with few assets besides what is between the ears of some of their key people. Both trends have focused managers on knowledge as an asset of the firm, to be developed and managed in the same manner as more traditional assets.