JIC

19,1 Guest editorial

Intellectual capital in education

2 Introduction
Schools, and especially universities, are currently undergoing major challenges as their
role in society constantly changes. From a teaching perspective, the internet and online
technologies have seen the introduction of massive online offered courses (MOOCS) and the
opportunity for students to choose between online, distance, and mixed-modes of education.
These changes are disrupting the foundations of traditional schools that must now compete
with public and private online offerings that challenge face-to-face classroom teaching.
Similarly, professional accreditations, such as the Microsoft Certification, are important
qualifications that go beyond traditional education. Higher education is no longer the remit
of a privileged social class. University and professional education are becoming more
available, and online platforms can reach students worldwide. However, as higher education
spreads, it no longer guarantees a job but has become a minimum requirement for one.
These changes are coupled with an inrush of students to established schools and
universities in Australia, the USA, UK, and the EU from developing nations, such as China
and India. The flood is changing the higher education landscape in these countries,
transforming university education into a major export industry. However, exporting
education does not guarantee a continuing income stream for these countries. Universities in
developing nations are improving their courses and moving up the ranking tables.
Thus, tomorrow’s universities will be far different than what they are today.
The influx of foreign students is also creating a reliance on income from foreign students
to fund universities. For example, in Australia in 2016 there were more than half a
million foreign students contributing about AUS$12 billion to the education sector, and
more than AUS$19.7 billion to the economy. This student income is necessary due to cuts in
education funding. As a result, universities are becoming more entrepreneurial and are
developing courses to attract and retain foreign students. However, the uncertainty of the
income stream also results in increased use of adjunct staff, which puts pressure on existing
human capital in teaching and in achieving high-quality research outcomes.
Since the beginning of the IC movement, universities are the subject of research,
investigating issues such as intellectual property (Fine and Castagnera, 2003), management
(Sánchez and Elena, 2006), research and development (Castellanos et al., 2004), and reporting
(Sánchez et al., 2009; Low et al., 2015). These approaches are what Petty and Guthrie (2000)
identify as second-stage IC research. However, more recently, research has focussed on IC
practice, or third-stage IC research (Guthrie et al., 2012) inside universities (Vincenza et al.,
2013; Secundo et al., 2015; Vagnoni and Oppi, 2015).
Additionally, research at the cutting edge is examining the third mission of universities
from the perspective of technology transfer and innovation, continuing education, and social
engagement (Secundo et al., 2016, p. 299). The latter is in line with Dumay and Garanina’s
(2013, p. 21) fourth stage of IC research which helps “navigate the knowledge created by
countries, cities and communities and advocates how knowledge can be widely developed
thus switching from a managerial to an ecosystem focus”. The transition from traditional
academia to an enhanced third-mission role is crucial for transforming universities and
Journal of Intellectual Capital higher education providers as they continue to consolidate their position as critical players
Vol. 19 No. 1, 2018
pp. 2-9
in socio-economic development and regional growth (Foray et al., 2012; Kempton et al., 2013).
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1469-1930
Because of the interest in IC and educational institutions and their dynamic operating
DOI 10.1108/JIC-10-2017-0140 environment, new opportunities for future research are emerging (Guthrie and Dumay, 2015).
This special issue is an outlet for that research. In this special issue, we present a variety Guest editorial
of international studies at the forefront of IC in education research. In the following
paragraphs, we highlight the themes represented in the papers. To conclude, we offer our
views on the overall contribution of this special issue and highlight the research that still
needs to be done.

Identifying future directions for IC research in education: a literature review 3

It is important to have a literature review to open any special issue as a way of introducing
the state-of-the-art topics. In this special issue, we invited Bisogno et al. (2018) to conduct
the task and to link past research with the papers appearing in this edition. Bisogno et al.
(2018) find that IC in education research is concentrated in Europe and mainly addresses
IC in universities. Additionally, current IC research is progressing by examining IC
practices inside universities using a third-stage IC approach, with new research also
concentrating on third-mission outcomes. Bisogno et al. (2018) conclude that there is scope
to continue IC and education research beyond universities into other educational
environments, such as primary and high schools and professional qualifications.
Additionally, there is no research on how technology can be used to reshape the spread of
education beyond the classroom and into countries and social classes that have not
traditionally had access to education.
A highlight of this paper is their concluding comments about expanding IC in education
into what Dumay, Guthrie, Ricceri, and Nielsen (2017) now refer to as the fifth stage of IC
research, which abandons the boundaries of the educational institution. The fifth stage
considers how IC can help to resolve social issues by viewing educational institutions as
stakeholders within a larger ecosystem, for example, the provision of free vs paid university
education. Thinking about relationships beyond the boundaries of an individual school or
research centre to society in general moves beyond fourth-stage IC ecosystems. It implores
educational institutions to be collectively involved in their community, rather than operate
as a single, independent institution.

Ten years of using knowledge balance sheets in Austrian public universities –

retrospective and perspective
Austrian public universities have made an outstanding contribution to IC research over the
years. They implemented the first, and still only, mandatory IC statements. If there has been
one continuously debated hot topic in IC and non-financial reporting, it is the debate
as to whether IC reporting should be mandatory. Thus, the paper by Piber et al. (2018) adds
to research about the impact of mandatory IC reporting from which other domains, such
as integrated, corporate governance, and sustainability reporting can garner insights.
The Austrian experience is especially enlightening because, regardless of consistent calls by
scholars for policy makers to make IC and other forms of reporting mandatory, these calls
fall on deaf ears.
In their paper, Piber et al. (2018) use longitudinal data to understand the top-down
implementation of knowledge balance sheets and examine how numbers help describe the
qualitative aspects of IC. The paper is interesting because it identifies both the functional
and dysfunctional characteristics of mandatory IC disclosure. Thus, the paper contributes
to understanding how IC theory becomes practice and shows that there are pitfalls
alongside its intended benefits. The practical implications are twofold. First, in order to
identify aspects of monetary, utilitarian, social, and environmental value, a concerted
effort to embed quantitative data in a discourse on the qualitative impact on value would
be needed. Second, Piber et al. (2018) support a “communicative culture first” rather than a
“tool-box first” approach.
JIC Human capital loss in an academic performance measurement system
19,1 The Martin-Sardesi and Guthrie (2018) paper is important because it examines one of
Sveiby’s (2010) main criticisms of IC – that IC should not be used for management control
purposes. A similar sentiment echoes from Gowthorpe (2009) who questioned whether
measuring IC performance was a new way to bully employees. What Martin-Sardesi and
Guthrie (2018) offer in their paper is a nuanced examination of academic human capital in
4 response to research performance measurement within the wider context of a university’s
research performance measurement system and a national research performance
measurement exercise. The paper is important from a policy perspective as more and
more countries implement research performance assessment, because policy makers,
university administration managers, and academics need to understand the functional and
dysfunctional outcomes of implementing these policies.
In the paper, Martin-Sardesi and Guthrie (2018) show how the performance management
system had unintended consequences that eventually led to a loss in academic human
capital. Thus, the paper addresses what might happen if a performance management
system that measures intangibles is implemented without considering its potential negative
effects. If we are not careful, the push to promote more academic research without ensuring
its quality may backfire. Educators should not need to game the system by concentrating on
the number of outputs, rather than the quality of the outputs. However, it is easy to judge
research output by the number of publications; it is more difficult to judge output quality
because it may take time for that quality to be recognised.

Intellectual capital and university performance in emerging countries:

Evidence from Colombian public universities
The next paper by Greco et al. (2018) builds on university performance but tackles it on a
national rather than an individual basis. Understanding how a university system, and the
individual universities within it, performs is important to policy makers because there is
increasing demand from the general public to ensure taxes are effectively spent on
education. The paper is also interesting because it examines an emerging country context,
which is under-represented in current IC in education research (Guthrie and Dumay, 2015).
An interesting model for analysing the relationship between IC and university performance
in Colombian public universities is presented and discussed. The model identifies the
associations between the IC accrued in universities and their ability to transfer it to society
in the form of science, innovation, and education, which links it to the fourth stage of IC
research (Dumay and Garanina, 2013). Additionally, the paper serves as a guide for
choosing public policies that are aimed at improving performance. Last, the paper uses a
quantitative approach, which is also not commonly found in IC research (Dumay, 2014).

With or without corporate universities: a comparative study of efficiency of

European and Russian corporate universities
Continuing the performance debate, Parshakov and Shakina (2018) paper look at privately
funded universities as opposed to public universities. Here, the debate is about whether or
not there is value in investing in corporate universities that are specifically created to
develop structural and human capital for the companies that create them. And further,
whether operating a corporate university is a signal of being an industry leader. Thus, the
paper develops an analysis of corporate universities by identifying how they develop
competitive advantages and are regarded favourably by investors. Additionally, Parshakov
and Shakina (2018) investigate corporate university functions as substitutes for the
educational programs offered by traditional academic and professional institutions.
The results presented by Parshakov and Shakina (2018) are interesting because
they find that, while there are espoused benefits to developing a corporate university, they Guest editorial
come at a considerable cost, which may destroy more value than they create. They advocate
that leveraging the strong relational capital of an existing public university may achieve the
same outcomes for developing human capital without the significant costs of operating a
corporate university.

Transmitting competencies at Kazakhstan universities: intellectual capital of 5

teachers
Next, the Sultanova et al. (2018) paper is interesting because it moves from looking at the
performance of universities to the performance of teachers. No doubt, measuring teacher
performance is a contentious issue and, again, we are reminded of the dangers of using IC as
a management control (Sveiby, 2010). However, the paper is innovative because, through
empirical research and a case study, it attempts to create IC-based indicators for
understanding the IC of teachers and how their performance then impacts the employability
of graduates (i.e. intellectual capital and employability readiness indicators). Considering
graduate employment is a key outcome of a university education, the paper offers some
unique insights into how universities can measure and improve their human capital and
then transfer the IC into positive employment outcomes for students to increase the human
capital of a society. The paper introduces a regression model that tests the influence of
IC-based indicators as a university management tool. However, Sultanova et al. (2018) also
underline the need to introduce a longitudinal analysis that includes several universities
courses at different levels to explain causality. They also recommend further improvements
to their model including, for example, analysing student and administrator motivations.

The impact of higher education on entrepreneurial intention and human capital

Moving from the performance argument to the third mission, Passaro et al. (2018) begin
another theme of this special issue based on entrepreneurialism. As Passaro et al. (2018)
argue, entrepreneurialism is needed in universities in Europe to be consistent with the
European Union and national policies. The paper investigates the impact of higher
education on the emergence of entrepreneurial intention and human capital as a component
of intellectual capital that strongly influences the entrepreneurial process. As a result,
Passaro et al. (2018) call for universities to develop practice-oriented entrepreneurial courses
and activities for students ( first mission) and aspiring academic entrepreneurs (third
mission) to encourage entrepreneurialism and develop human capital that will allow
students to pursue entrepreneurial careers, rather than become job seekers after graduating.
The paper contributes to an emerging research theme that analyses whether and how
entrepreneurial intention can mediate the relationship between higher education and human
capital, thus helping to build a link between IC and entrepreneurial development.

Intellectual capital management in the fourth stage of IC research: a critical

case study in university settings
This paper by Secundo et al. (2018) also builds on investigating the third mission of
universities using a case study of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Using Secundo et al.’s
(2016) collective intelligence framework, the research highlights how the university
incorporates its core goal (what) with the collective involvement of stakeholders (who), and
its motivations behind achieving goals (why) with the processes inside the university (how)
to demonstrate the indicators that measure value creation. The findings demonstrate that IC
management needs to change to incorporate an ecosystem perspective. The paper
contributes to fourth-stage IC research by demonstrating how the university extends value
creation beyond its boundaries to impact the society in which it operates. The practical
JIC implications reflect how more stakeholders are involved in IC management and that IC
19,1 management requires a critical rethinking given the evolving role of universities.
Secundo et al. (2018) bring together issues that are usually dealt with in separate domains of
the literature: IC management and collective intelligence in the university setting.

A quality evaluation approach to disclosing third mission activities and

6 intellectual capital in Italian universities
In keeping with the third mission theme, Di Bernardino and Corsi (2018) investigate how IC
contributes to the third mission of universities in Italy. Through a quality evaluation
approach, the research statistically analyses data emerging from the national assessment
for research activity and third mission performance from 71 universities during the period
2004-2014. Thus, the study investigates whether mandatory reporting on the quality
assessment of Italian universities discloses IC’s contribution to value creation.
Di Bernardino and Corsi (2018) find significant IC disclosure in the quality evaluation
model and verify the usefulness of mandatory reporting in achieving more awareness of
third mission strategies and IC management. The research is novel because it explores the
convergence between research quality and IC culture in Italian universities, including how
social and economic value is created by intangible activities outside university boundaries.
As their analysis is based on investigating research and third mission activity,
Di Bernardino and Corsi (2018) recommend that future research should focus on the role
of teaching activities and on university managers, researchers, and administrative staff.

Academic spinoffs as a value driver for intellectual capital: the case of the
University of Pisa
The last paper exploring university entrepreneurship and IC is Mariani et al. (2018), who
investigate the impact of spinoff businesses from the University of Pisa in Italy. Academic
spinoffs demonstrate the value created by university technology transfer investments.
Most importantly, the paper shows how the technology and knowledge developed by
universities are transferred to communities, and how the benefits are multiplied rather than
directly transferred. Through measurements of value and multipliers, Mariani et al. (2018)
demonstrate the relationship between investment in innovation and the enterprise value of
academic spinoffs, which they use as a proxy for investment output and an expression of IC
creation. The paper is innovative because it provides insights into how a university can
create value for an economy and help build the IC of the communities in which the spinoffs
exist. In the long run, the spinoffs also help to develop an entrepreneurial mindset in the
local Pisa community. In the long term, this investment enriches research and the
entrepreneurial mindset.

Conclusion
To conclude this special issue on IC in education, the editors want to encourage a further
expansion of IC research. While we find comfort in seeing IC research progressing to the
third and fourth stages, it is not comforting to note that most IC research on education has a
European context and, most recently, mainly on Italian universities. The Italian university
system is under increasing pressure to establish third mission activities, but there are
considerably more and broader opportunities to report beyond what universities do and
examine what they contribute internationally to society.
As Martin-Sardesi and Guthrie (2018) and Di Bernardino and Corsi (2018) show,
universities are obsessed with ranking people and research outcomes, even ranking the
universities themselves. It seems that measuring performance and comparing people and
institutions has become an overbearing managerial mindset that may destroy value rather
than create it. Performance management systems can be just as dysfunctional as they are Guest editorial
functional, as Martin-Sardesi and Guthrie (2018) and Piber et al. (2018) show.
Unsurprisingly, the warning of using IC as management control was heralded by
Karl-Erik Sveiby (2010) many years ago. IC measurements can be used as just another
interesting way for powerful managers to bully people (Gowthorpe, 2009). Thus, we need
research that continues to explore both the good and the bad of using IC measurements in
universities to assess performance. By reducing people (HC), practices (SC), and 7
relationships (RC) to numbers and rankings we seem to have lost sight of the purpose of
education – to impart knowledge to students, who are the foundation of society’s future.
So while we lament, discussing what has now passed in the form of performance metrics
and rankings, we often lose sight of the real outcome, which is a better future for those who
will live in the world after we have gone. And there are many social issues that IC in education
still needs to discuss, like equitable and accessible education for all people regardless of age,
sex, race, or religion. Unfortunately, these problems exist and are steeped in a traditional
approach to education as the right of the privileged and ruling classes. While education is
mainly free in what we know as the developed world, it is not free in other countries. Yet, our
research focusses on such narrow issues as how to manage or report IC. These kinds of
problems are what Horst and Webber (1973) call “tame” problems – problems that can be
tackled by applying a management theory to come up with some relatively easy solutions.
Unfortunately, education must deal with social problems, and what IC researchers do (as do
researchers in other fields) is try to apply science to find a solution. But in the end, science
cannot solve “wicked” societal problems. For example, IC researchers were originally more
concerned with measuring IC than they were with managing IC (Guthrie et al., 2012). However,
even as we go forth into the third mission, it seems that policy makers and researchers
are more interested in measuring and ranking outcomes based on performance measures
(e.g. Di Bernardino and Corsi, 2018) that are totally irrelevant to an aspiring student who is not
allowed an education because they are in the wrong socio-economic situation. It is these kinds
of wicked problems that IC researchers need to address alongside solving the tamer issues.
To do so, we need to be transformative, interdisciplinary, open-minded, and critical of the
status quo (Dumay, Guthrie, and Rooney, 2017). These are the challenges for the future of
research on IC in education.
Giustina Secundo
Department of Innovation for Engineering, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy
Rosa Lombardi
Department of Law and Economics of Productive Activities,
University of Rome La Sapienza, Rome, Italy, and
John Dumay
Department of Accounting and Corporate Governance,
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

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