Making Sense of the Intangibles ‑ A Co‑Word Analysis of the most Important Perspective of Analysis

Abstract

Scholars have approached to managing intangible elements from several perspectives throughout the literature. This field of research is still young, with no more than two decades of more intensive empirical research, which has confirmed the relevance of intangible‑based elements on achieving a competitive edge in virtually every industry. Taxonomy and classifications of intangible elements have been built from either deductive or inductive methods. And also practitioners are more concerned and convinced that intangible elements are a key in the today⠒s competition, more than ever before. However, a categorization of approaches followed by scholars is still missed. The categorization proposed in this article will allow a more in‑depth understanding of how intangible elements may help to achieve a competitive advantage, either from a theoretical or an empirical perspective. In addition, it will provide further information on how the different intertwined approaches relate to each other and, hence, it will help scholars and practitioners to gain a further understanding of how to implement intangible‑based strategies more successfully. With these goals in mind, a search on the main databases was conducted (namely, ISI‑Web of Knowledge and Scopus). Up to 4,308 different articles dealing somehow with intangible assets were found. In this paper, the title and keywords are analyzed and the content is categorized in six different themes: Knowledge Management refers to IA and its consequences in the Knowledge cycle; Intellectual Capital refers to IAs as mainly the knowledge‑based economic value, divided into Human Capital, Relational Capital and Structural Capital; Human Resource Development refers to IAs as organizational learning; Economics deals with the micro and macroeconomic consequences of IAs and with the market of IAs; by Social Policy we mean IAs investment considered as a commodity which have social benefits and which are managed by social operators; and finally the Management and Accountability, where the quite old fashioned view is addressed a