The purpose of this paper is to examine the transferability of the intellectual capital approach methodology from the corporate to the national level. Just as financial measures fall short of covering major value drivers at the corporate level, gross national product does not sufficiently reflect future potentials to grow and to contribute to a globalising economy with trans‐national value chains, value cycles and value networks. There have been many efforts to develop core indicators of economic performance, such as ratings of competitiveness, global embeddedness, high‐tech exposure, spending in R&D, competencies to read and calculate of students and many more. The project team concluded that those measures showed two major weaknesses: they lack an overall framework and thus an analysis of their interplay and they overemphasise the reporting in relation to the development or management aspect of the factors considered by the respective approaches.
The team aspired to create a prototype knowledge report for Austria as part of a prototype procedure, the “Agenda Knowledge”, which should fuel efforts of the country to change its role in the emerging knowledge society from imitator to inventor. The endeavour was based on the Lisbon Agenda of the European Union, which integrates economic competitiveness and social cohesion. A trans‐disciplinary design was applied which is best described as action research and makes use of many different methods at different stages of the process; all methods were evaluated in terms of their effectiveness, efficiency and social acceptance.
Results of the pilot project comprise a prototype national knowledge report as part of an overarching prototype procedure which is able to deal with incommensurabilities at the level of visions and ends as well as with different paradigms at the level of end‐mean relations in a political rather than in an academic manner.
First process‐oriented approach to the development and monitoring of intellectual capital at the national level.
