How does intellectual capital align with cyber security?

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to position the preservation and protection of intellectual capital as a cyber security concern. The paper outlines the security requirements of intellectual capital to help boards of directors (BoDs) and executive management teams to understand their responsibilities and accountabilities in this respect. Design/methodology/approach The research methodology is desk research. In other words, we gathered facts and existing research publications that helped us to define key terms, to formulate arguments to convince BoDs of the need to secure their intellectual capital and to outline actions to be taken by BoDs to do so. Findings Intellectual capital, as a valuable business resource, is related to information, knowledge and cyber security. Hence, preservation thereof is also related to cyber security governance and merits attention from BoDs. Research limitations/implications This paper clarifies BoDs intellectual capital governance responsibilities, which encompass information, knowledge and cyber security governance. Practical implications The authors hope that BoDs will benefit from the clarifications, and especially from the positioning of intellectual capital in cyber space. Social implications If BoDs know how to embrace their intellectual capital governance responsibilities, this will help to ensure that such intellectual capital is preserved and secured. Originality/value This paper extends a previous paper published by Von Solms and Von Solms, which clarified the key terms of information and cyber security, and the governance thereof. The originality and value is the focus on the securing of intellectual capital, a topic that has not yet received a great deal of attention from security researchers.

Two decades of the Journal of Intellectual Capital: a bibliometric overview and an agenda for future research

“…Accordingly, an emerging focus area within IC research includes the exploration of improved methods to protect the firm's valuable assets from threats, especially cyber security threats, both internal and external. Renaud, et al (2019) and Sallos, et al (2019), in separate articles in JIC describe guidance for organizations and their boards of directors to protect the IC assets. In a forthcoming special issue, Renaud (2020) summarizes several JIC papers that present research related to cyber security and IC, as part of the “fourth wave” of IC research described by Dal Mas (2019).…”

Guest editorial

“…Dal Mas reports that a recently emergent fourth wave widens IC's perspective beyond organizations to the wider society. One societal area that has recently come to the fore is the interplay between IC and cyber Security (Renaud et al , 2019).…”

Securing intellectual capital: an exploratory study in Australian universities

“…In this paper, we reveal connections between IC-related knowledge security and traditional information security, which is generally concerned with the preservation of data and information. The study of knowledge security (Desouza and Vanapalli, 2005), is relatively immature (Desouza, 2006;Renaud et al, 2019), and, given the importance of IC within universities, we believe greater insights into this topic would be valuable to the HE sector as a whole.…”

“…individual tacit knowledge), structural capital (SC) (organizational processes, systems and routines that structure intellectual assets into group property) and relational/customer capital (RC) (understanding of ex-firm intangibles) (Bontis, 1998). Knowledge is at the core of IC (Stewart, 1997; Renaud et al , 2019) with organizations being considered “repositories and coordinators of intellect” (Quinn, 1992, p. 241), this being intrinsically linked to organizations' economic wealth and value creation (Paloma Sánchez and Elena, 2006). There is a growing interest (in both research and practice) into the role of IC in educational institutions (Bisogno et al , 2018) and particularly in higher education (HE) (Paloma Sánchez et al , 2009), where IC management is crucially important, given the knowledge-focused nature of their activities (Secundo et al , 2015).…”