Intellectual capital

 Knowledge of international business and capacity to understand how business works on a global
scale.
 Knowledge that can be converted into profit Harrison and Sullivan (2000.p.34)

 Sveiby (1997) is the first from the non-accounting perspective to propose the classification of IC,
and he concludes that intangibles can be categorized into three sub-categories:
(1) employee (individual) competence;
(2) internal structure
(3) external structure
 Edvinsson (1997) adopted the three categorizations of Sveiby, but termed them as:
(1) human capital
(2) organizational capital
(3) customer capital, respectively

 Bukh et al. (2001) compared various taxonomies of IC and came out with three things in
common:
(1) activities connected to employees
(2) tasks, processes and structures
(3) services and value-added activities connected to customers, very much similar to the three
categories of IC of Sveiby (1997).

Marr et al. (2003) identified that IC can be categorized into three main categories:
(1) strategy;
(2) influencing behaviour;
(3) external validation
Knowledge worker
 an employee whose job involves developing and using knowledge rather than producing goods
or services: Advanced economies are service-based, with labor markets split between highly
skilled knowledge workers and low-skilled service workers. Cambridge

 Knowledge workers tend usually to study for a longer time and in more advanced levels of
education, which induces reflection and the need to make impactful and conscious choices
about study focus and professional direction.

 The nature of the work is in essence more abstract, inducing the development of systemic
thinking and, consequently, a better understanding of the impact and contribution of
work in the whole.
 knowledge workers tend to have greater mobility and an increased number of
opportunities due to their broader exposure and global networks of contacts, meaning
that they have more options to choose from when it comes to work.
 “Today’s managerial challenge is to inspire and enable knowledge workers to solve, day in
and day out, problems that cannot be anticipated.”27 In a learning organization,
employees continually acquire and share new knowledge and apply that knowledge in
making decisions or doing their work.