Management of Intellectual Capital by Optimal Portfolio Selection

摘要

An important issue for the management team of R&D departments is the selection of a portfolio of projects in periods of excess demand. Standard methods mostly focus on project selection on the basis of expected returns. In many cases other strategic aspects are important e.g. at the department level the development of intellectual capital or at the company level achieving comparative advantage. In this paper we develop a tool for portfolio selection, explicitly taking into account the measurement and balancing of these strategic factors. The indicators of an intellectual capital scorecard are periodically measured against a target and constitute the input of a linear programming model. From the optimal portfolio computed by the model, clear objectives for management can be derived. Our method is illustrated in an industrial case study.