Knowledge management, intellectual capital and entrepreneurship: a structured literature review

摘要

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze within the knowledge management (KM) stream the relationship between KM and intellectual capital (IC) and entrepreneurship (E). IC is a pivotal intangible resource to firms to generate knowledge. Knowledge and information are strategic for today's company life. IC is generated and dynamically recombined by knowledge, produces knowledge and is feed by knowledge itself, both codified and tacit. For those reasons, the paper is motivated to understand how IC can represent valuable knowledge and how it can turn into innovation, through KM and practices. It is also voted to stimulate literature on understanding how innovation can serve E capabilities for firms' business models, as innovation is not necessarily linked to a technological breakthrough. IC is functional to KM practices, as entrepreneurs can use IC and knowledge as a strategic management toolbox to innovate. Design/methodology/approach The main aim of the paper is to understand the state of the art on these central issues in KM literature. The paper uses a structure literature review (SLR) methodology, gathering papers by Scopus database for the period 2000-2019, on the relationship between KM and IC and E. The second aim is to understand for future research how do managers use IC as an opportunity to innovate and as a vehicle to transfer knowledge. The authors wondered about the qualification/quantification of "knowledge" as a crucial component of IC, which is in turn the riskier, but the more representative, a component of intangibles assets in the era of knowledge. Findings As for the first research question, the findings show that, actually, as the research has been started, IC, KM and E are still engaged separately by scholars, even if few efforts to match them together have been performed. The results depict a general fragmented and unsystematic vision of the relationship between the three topics. As for the future of the research about these topics, the authors found that scholars should catch the opportunity to go beyond the traditional theoretical mainstream on these issues. There is an urge to move the focus of KM and IC research toward new models of their interconnection, by including the social capital, namely, knowledge capabilities (explicit or not), etc., which are able to turn knowledge in innovation and competitive advantage, from an accounting perspective (recognizing IC's components affecting the performance of firms, among which knowledge is the most important) and from a theoretical point of view (reducing the misalignment between the epistemological concept of KM requirements and the effective perception of organizational KM activities to extract value from KM initiatives). Research limitations/implications The results, even if suffering from some limitations due to the performing of the methodology, offers several implications for academic research. The future of KM of the IC resources is clearly likely to lie on the recognition of the component of knowledge, as well as on the recognizing of new forms of social capital such as entrepreneurial capital, which is connected to innovation and creativity and firm value. An integrative framework of IC measurement should be built to link IC with KM and E. This is to guarantee that the measurement of IC does contribute to the efficiency and effectiveness of KM. Practical implications Practical contribution to accounting perspective.