Understanding the impact of intellectual capital on entrepreneurship: a literature review

Abstract

PurposeThe present paper aims to explore and map the development of the intellectual capital (IC)-related studies by answering the following research questions: (1) what are the theoretical pillars on which prior literature focusing on the IC–entrepreneurship relationship has grown and expanded?; (2) what are the main research areas covered by past literature focused on the IC–entrepreneurship relationship?; (3) which areas of research should be explored in the future?Design/methodology/approachThe study relied on the co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling techniques to investigate a complete data set of IC–entrepreneurship publications.FindingsFindings indicated that scholars' attention had increased, starting from the beginning of the 2000s due to the widespread recognition of the importance of knowledge for firms' competitive advantage. Results of the co-citation clustering analysis have identified five main theoretical building blocks of the IC–entrepreneurship literature, which addressed both the basics of IC foundations and more specific aspects related to IC (family firms and the measurement of IC). Results of the bibliographic coupling analysis indicated that future studies should consider the existence of interactions and synergies among the different components of IC. Furthermore, attention should be devoted to the management practices of IC.Originality/valueThe present study represents the contributions offered by IC to studies about entrepreneurship strategies. Building on findings emerging from a qualitative content analysis on clustered prior publications, the authors discuss a research agenda that is expected to inspire future studies to continue the exploration of the crucial characteristics of IC in contributing to entrepreneurial and managerial studies.

The reverse transfer of knowledge in MNEs: the perspective of foreign subsidiaries in a post-transition country

“…Another thing is the ability of a FS to integrate the knowledge that resides in its employees. The social aspects related to social connections that are created between managers (entrepreneurs) are also highlighted by Crupi et al (2020) in their latest work.…”

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.…”

“…exploring some IC dimensions only at the macro level. Crupi et al (2020) aimed to map the ICentrepreneurship relationship, and some contributions for business and management studies at the organisational (meso) level were evidenced. Also, Baima et al (2020) explored how the literature addressed IC and business model and identified some future research trends at organisational (meso) level.…”

Family control and influence on JV investment – the moderating effect of JV type and IC components

“…Recent research has also highlighted the importance of pointing out the possible interactions and synergies between the different components of IC (Crupi et al, 2020): they influence each other and certain components of IC can benefit from the improvement of other components (Johnson, 1999;Reed et al, 2006). However, to the best of our knowledge, the literature has not yet analyzed the effect of IC and JV type in family business investment in joint ventures.…”