Guest Editor’s introduction to the special issue

Citation

O'Sullivan, K.J. (2009), "Guest Editor’s introduction to the special issue", VINE, Vol. 39 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/vine.2009.28739aaa.002

Guest Editor’s introduction to the special issue

Article Type: Guest Editor’s introduction to the special issue From: VINE: The journal of information and knowledge management systems, Volume 39, Issue 1

In this special issue of Vine: The journal of knowledge management systems we have presented seven papers developed from proceedings first presented at the 5th International Conference on Intellectual Capital and Knowledge Management that was hosted at New York Institute of Technology in New York, USA in October of 2008.

The papers presented here are all from a particular track on measuring intangibles and intellectual capital that was facilitated by Bernard Marr of the Advanced Performance Institute and credit is due to him for putting together an excellent mini track at the conference. I believe that when you read the papers that were developed from the proceedings presented at the conference that the mini track did indeed succeed in bringing some excellent thought leaders to the fore.

Another note of interest to readers of this journal is that we were honored to have Dr Michael Stankosky, Editor Emeritus of this journal as the keynote speaker at the conference. Dr Stankosky’s keynote was very well received by the over 100 delegates from 23 countries.

Now to the papers within this special issue. We have a collection of articles focused on intangibles and intellectual capital. In the first of these, “The best returns come from intangible resources: an integrated approach”, Sequeira, Fernández y Fernández and Borges examine existing models for intangible asset valuation and introduce a new approach based on a core competencies approach. In the second article, “A learning curve exploratory theory for team learning valuation”, Zorgios, Vlismas and Venieris examine how the quantitative semantics of the learning curve phenomena can be employed within knowledge-intensive production environments.

In “Intangible asset contribution to company performance: the ‘hierarchical assessment index’”, Grimaldi and Cricelli define a theoretical model to assess and measure intangible asset contribution to company performance through the use of an hierarchical assessment index (HAI). In “Designing operative productivity measures in public services”, Jääskeläinen and Lönnqvist present a research paper focused on the role of different output elements of two services provided by the City of Helsinki, Finland. The paper illustrates how these factors can be measured in practice.

Brännström and Giuliani present research on an investigation of the first year of application of a new accounting principle that contributes to the debate on how and what intellectual capital should be disclosed in their paper “Accounting for intellectual capital: a comparative analysis”. Following on from this, Cavaller describes the application of scientometrics and patent bibliometrics in remaining useful life (RUL) analysis for valuing intangible assets.

In our final article for this special issue, Stam contributes a very interesting article entitled “Intellectual liabilities: lessons from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in which he examines not only intellectual assets, but their corresponding liabilities which he argues is essential to having a full understanding of the status of an organization’s intellectual capital.

Kevin J. O’SullivanDepartment of Management and Marketing, New York Institute of Technology, New York, New York, USA