The Role of Intangible Capital in Economic Growth: Organizational, Regional and Personal Dimensions

Abstract

In this paper we analyse from a conceptual view but also with relation to some empirical evidence, how

Intangible Capital (IaC) may be useful for individuals, organizations and regions in order to contribute to Economic

Growth (EG). It is, in our opinion a very important question in the scope of the economy of the 21st century because we

sincerely believe that Intangibles are the driving force of today’s economy. We therefore first make a conceptual study on

the importance of intangibles in today’s world and after underline these assumptions with some very illustrative examples.

We conclude that Intangible Capital Science is in fact a sparse and diverse set of knowledge across different independent

academic disciplines such as Human Resource Development (HRD), Intellectual Capital (IC) and Knowledge Management

(KM) just to name the more recent, but it is also being debated in some more traditional fields such as Social Policy (SP),

Economics (Ecs) and Traditional Management (TdM). Furthermore, all those scientific branches, even when they are

somehow difficult to follow by practitioners, decisively indicate that IaC has in practice and potentially the capacity to

have major and positive impacts on EG through the mediation of individuals, organizations and regions. For practitioners

this fact should be very important because IaC should become THE major cause of concern as an asset, and investment, a

market, a policy field because it is today’s main source of prosperity. For scholars, the consequence is that IaC science

should become a more unified field, and authors should try to merge from their specific starting area to achieve a more

comprehensive and large understanding of IaC themselves. We also believe this is one of the first papers ever that tries to

make science of IaC in using the various six perspectives mentioned above and also within the three dimensions –

individual, organizational and regional. Finally we expect that, due to its scope, in the future IaC science will be as

important as economics, management or engineering are in the world of today.