Reflections on JIC’s twenty-year history and suggestions for future IC research

Abstract

PurposeThe threefold purpose of this paper is to reflect on the evolution and transformation of the Journal of Intellectual Capital (JIC) over the past 20 years, to project its future research directions, and, finally, to propose an IC ecosystem.Design/methodology/approachWe adopted a combination of a narrative and a systematic review of 700 JIC papers appearing in the journal in its entirety, from Volume 1 (2000) to Volume 20 (2019). The categorization of topics is based on the frequency of keywords in the titles of the papers.FindingsScholars have proposed four stages of intellectual capital (IC) research: definition/awareness, measurement/management, implementation/strategy, and ecosystem. Over the past 20 years, a total of 16 special issues were published in the journal. The five topics with the highest paper counts in descending order are country-specific studies, concept papers, reporting and disclosure, measurement and performance. Four issues require the researcher’s special attention: theoretical development, IC research methodology, national intellectual capital, and data collection. An IC ecosystem is proposed to invite discussion and refinement. For future research, ecosystem-oriented and interdisciplinary research are suggested. Research design aimed at achieving Sustainable Development Goals are encouraged.Research limitations/implicationsIntellectual capital research has implications for four major types of stakeholders, namely academia, government agencies, practitioners, and top management team of organizations. The major limitation of this research is that this review of twenty years of intellectual capital research is limited exclusively to the papers published in the JIC; IC papers published in relevant journals or conferences were not included.Originality/valueThis paper presents a comprehensive review of the articles published in the first 20 volumes of the JIC. The field of intellectual capital has evolved from the social construction of IC knowledge to IC knowledge diffusion and inheritance. Hopefully, a fully developed IC ecosystem will eventually emerge. IC researchers can position themselves in the IC research continuum and devise distinctive pathways to enhance their contributions to the transformation of IC research.

Modelling intangibles at the regional level in Europe: what lessons from a multidimensional approach?

“…In this paper, we move intangible capital research towards greater consideration of regional level of analysis to examine intangible assets-performance linkage. This is in line with the necessity of extending the research agenda, beyond the microeconomic economic dimensions of economic performance (Dumay, 2013;Lin & Edvinsson, 2021).…”

Intellectual capital reporting and mandatory adoption of post-IFRS – An empirical analysis using computational linguistic tools

“…Dabi c et al (2020) have applied bibliometric to summarize IC articles over past two decades in order to identify past and current themes on IC for potential topics for future research. Lin and Edvinsson (2020) have reflected on the evolution of the IC research in the Journal of Intellectual Capital and have proposed an ecosystem-oriented research that are inter-disciplinary and help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.…”

Multilevel approaches to advancing the measurement of intellectual capital research field–What can we learn from the literature?

“…Recently and already in the year 2020 others systematic reviews have emerged to address the IC (Alvino et al, 2020;Baima et al, 2020;Bamel et al, 2020;Bellucci et al, 2020;Crupi et al, 2020;Huang et al, 2020;Lin and Edvinsson, 2020;Svarc et al, 2020). However, none of them proposed a holistic model that can measure IC at micro, meso and macro levels.…”

“…Others studies (Bellucci et al, 2020;Bamel et al, 2020;Lin and Edvinsson, 2020) performed a systematic review about IC but considering only articles published in the Journal of Intellectual Capital. For instance, Bellucci et al (2020) aimed to explore emerging themes and future trends over five years (2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018) and identified the use of bibliometric methods as a missing tile in the field of research.…”

“…Bamel et al (2020) examined the main literature trends, including the extent and impact of IC research during 20 years . And, Lin and Edvinsson (2020) identified four stages of IC research-definition, measurement, implementation and ecosystem, over the past 20 years.…”