The role of universities in consolidating intellectual capital and generating new knowledge for a sustainable bio-economy

This study focuses on the wide debated concept of bio-economy, underlying its evolution and connection with universities’ goal, from the intellectual capital (IC) perspective. It’s aim is to highlight the mutual influence of IC disclosures and knowledge management in its ability to foster the development of the bio economic environment. Thus, this paper covers a significant gap by approaching the universities' IC disclosure and bio-economy evolution. It also enriches the literature by underpinning the proposed model on the macroeconomics theories (public interest theory, stakeholders or agency theory). These theories supports the need to enhance transparency and accountability through greater disclosure levels. The empirical research performed by combining the qualitative analysis performed for developing the IC disclosure index with the quantitative techniques enable us to develop an econometric model on the Romanian public universities. It is aimed to express their role in the IC as a mean of achieving a sustainable economy. The study’ results reveal that there is a strong connection between the IC disclosure and bio-economy, knowing that public universities are research clusters for innovative and durable economy environment. Moreover, based on the Romanian public universities' position, we identified and discussed about the explanatory factors influencing the IC disclosures, which can help or stimulate the association between the public and private interest, having bio-economy as a focus point.