Assessing Intellectual Capital Using the Evidential Reasoning Approach: Application on Small and Medium Enterprises

One of the fundamental features of enterprises' supremacy over one another, particularly in SMEs, is intangible assets and their intellectual capital (IC). Varieties of approaches to assessing and evaluating enterprises' intellectual capital have far been offered. None of them, however, has been considered in the face of qualitative indicators and their synthesis and quantitative indicators, as well as accounting the failure to have access to evidence during evaluation. In this article, a framework for the assessment of intellectual capital is offered by using an evidential reasoning approach developed based on a hierarchical model and Dempster–Shafer (D–S) theory of evidence. The explanation of this framework is accompanied by its application in the assessment of intellectual capital of SMEs in the field of IT in one of Iran's regions.