THE RELEVANCE OF INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL IN SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED ENTERPRISES

Faria, Vinícius Figueiredo de; Correa, Fabio; Ziviani, Fabricio

doi:10.1590/1981-5344/42023

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Artigos • Perspect. ciênc. inf. 28 • 2023 • https://doi.org/10.1590/1981-5344/42023 linkcopy

THE RELEVANCE OF INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL IN SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED ENTERPRISES

A RELEVÂNCIA DO CAPITAL INTELECTUAL NAS PEQUENAS E MÉDIAS EMPRESAS

Authorship SCIMAGO INSTITUTIONS RANKINGS

Understanding the environment of small and medium-sized companies is indeed relevant, since they are considered a driver of economic and socio-environmental development, due to their ability to generate jobs. However, considering the strategic importance of small and medium-sized companies for the economy, society and governments, the challenge of understanding the peculiarities of the dimensions of Intellectual Capital in this environment is still something to be explored in depth. Thus, the present study is conducted to empirically examine the dimensions of use and value creation of Intellectual Capital in small and medium-sized companies and, simultaneously, provide a clear vision of the strategic role of Intellectual Capital in the effective management of knowledge assets. Through a quantitative approach, this research made use of an online survey as a method of treating the ambition, and the results show that all dimensions of Intellectual Capital have significant effects on the creation of value in small and medium-sized companies. However, it also reveals that the lack of investment capacity seems to be an obstacle to sustainability. The present study has a number of respondent limitations and future studies may not only be carried out in a larger sample, but also contemplate other aspects.

Keywords:
Intellectual capital; Intellectual capital dimensions; Small and medium-sized enterprises

Dimension	Definition	Authors
Human Capital	knowledge, skills, learning capacity, experience and know-how of employees. Learning capacity, teamwork capacity, innovation capacity, know-how, experience, flexibility, motivation, satisfaction, loyalty, formal training, and education.	Ricceri (2008)
Human Capital	Sum of employee’s knowledge, competence, innovativeness, commitment and wisdom.	Morris (2015)
Structural Capital	Stock of knowledge that stays in the organization at the end of the day, after the employees go home. knowledge contained in documents, routines and organizational culture.	Curado (2008)
Structural Capital	Organizational capabilities, culture, processes, patents, copyrights, trademarks, databases, and so on.	Denicolai, Ramusino and Sotti (2015)
Relational Capital	Sum of all the relations which an organization develops through the course of conducting business with customers and different marketing channels.	Chang and Tseng (2005)
Relational Capital	Knowledge obtained through the establishment of relationships with external stakeholders.	Yu et al. (2015)

Dimension	Question	Value added	Authors
Human Capital (HC)	The organization depends entirely on the experience and skill of the employees in carrying out their work.	Dependence on human skills	Bozzolan, Favotto and Ricceri (2003); Colombo and Grilli (2005); Ricceri (2008); Unger et al. (2011); Rodrigues (2014); Morris (2015); Staniewski (2016); McDowell et al. (2018); Hartati and Hadiwidjaja (2019).
	The organization has great confidence in the performance of its employees in relation to alignment with its business.	Strategic adherence
	Employees have a high level of developed skills.	Employee autonomy
	Vacancies in work teams are filled by experienced and qualified employees.	Employee skills
	The organization stresses that the continuous efforts to qualify and develop employees would be dedicated to those who offer better performance and would not be applied to those with inferior performance.	Employee incentive programs
	The organization is struggling to provide workers with skills and practices with intensive training programs.	Adherence to development of skills
Structural Capital (SC)	The organization pays due attention to reducing rework in carrying out activities.	Adherence to the quality process	Stewart (1997); Petty and Guthrie (2000); Curado (2008); Bozzolan, Favotto and Ricceri, (2003); Denicolai, Ramusino and Sotti (2015); Jinini, Dahiyat and Bontis (2019).
	The processes are to guarantee the quality of products easily accessible and understood by the entire organization.	Customer focus
	The organization is concerned with its trademark and pays special attention to disseminating this concern both internally and to customers.	Assimilation of brand value
	The internal and external communication system is efficient and provides the necessary information to those who are due at the moment.	Adherence to communication management
	The organization invests in the acquisition of systems that aim to improve the processing and publication of information.	Adherence to innovation management
	Internal processes are supporting and leverage innovation.	Adherence to research and innovation
Relational Capital (RC)	The organization operates with its full potential at full capacity to satisfy customers.	R&D processes aimed at technology transfer	Sveiby (1997); Bozzolan, Favotto and Ricceri (2003); Chang and Tseng (2005); Yu; Wang; Chang (2015); Kanchana and Mohan (2017).
	The organization conducts dialogues with customers, to identify their needs and desires, sometimes not even of their own knowledge.	Co-design processes in partnership with customers
	The organization intensively works with the exchange of information that contributes to the opening of new horizons for mutual cooperation with customers.	Co-design processes with suppliers
	The organization seeks to reduce problems, offering solutions to customers.	Complaints management processes developed
	The organization is seeking the participation of customers in its operations, in order to find development opportunities.	Knowledge development processes in partnerships
	The organization has programs to increase the customer portfolio in the short/medium term.	Development initiatives for market gain

Variables	Categories	Respondents	%
Sector	Industry	22	12%
	Commerce	49	27%
	Service	112	61%
Area	Administrative and Human resources	13	7%
	Sales and marketing	22	12%
	Finance and purchasing	9	5%
	Operations and logistics	11	6%
	Company board	86	47%
	Other	42	23%
Position	Shareholder	95	52%
	Manager	37	20%
	Coordinator	11	6%
	Analyst	18	10%
	Assistant	22	12%
Number of employees	1 to 10	95	52%
	11 to 20	15	8%
	21 to 30	9	5%
	31 to 40	9	5%
	Above 40	55	30%
Total		183	100%

Dimension	n	Minimum	Maximum	Median	Variance	Std. Deviation
HC	6	0.58	0.83	0.74	0.0096	0.0978
SC	6	0.68	0.81	0.74	0.0021	0.0461
RC	6	0.66	0.83	0.77	0.0040	0.0633

	HC	SC	RC
HC	1.00
SC	0.70*	1.00
RC	0.78*	0.48*	1.00

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[TFN1] Source: authors (2021).