Intellectual Capital in Public Universities : The Performance - Oriented Approach

The paper reviews the initiatives concerning the measurement, management and disclosure of intellectual capital (IC) in public universities. Those organizations also are facing the challenge of manage intangibles in their value creation process. Several researches have been developed linking some elements of IC (human, structural and relational capital) to performance indicators, and applying them to diverse business sectors. However, IC is still not being sufficiently implemented in universities and similar knowledge - based organizations. Only three main initiatives are remarkable in the existing academic literature: (1) the ICU-Report, (Sánchez et al., 2001); (Observatory of the European University, 2006); (2) the Danish IC Guidelines (DMSTI, 2003); (3) the Austrian Research Centres initiative, reported by Leitner (2004), which is mandatory for Austrian universities since 2006. All of them are connected to IC reporting model, but there is not a clear linkage among the several elements they include and their output, nor the possible interacting links among them. As a novelty, it is proposed the use of a structural model equation system to assess those cause - effect linkages. The proposed framework for discussion is a matrix including the missions, IC elements and performance indicators. Another novelty is that the performance construct shall include performance indicators concerning the main missions in universities: teaching, researching and the so - called third mission, transferring knowledge