Intellectual capital: the relationship between purpose and economic sectors

Decades have passed since companies have been challenged to evaluate their intangible and intellectual components. For the most technological and innovative organisations, measuring economic, financial, and operational success involves identifying, extracting, measuring, and disclosing intellectual capital. In this context, intangible assets emerge as the cornerstone of the information and knowledge economy, with their measurement constituting the central challenge of the research field known as intellectual capital. However, research dedicated to studying intangible assets differs in its motivations for why organisations, across various sectors of the economy, should measure intellectual capital. Therefore, the aim of this article is to shed some light on this complex field, segregating and explaining why intellectual capital measurement is done and how it relates to different sectors of the contemporary economy. As a result, the identification of purposes appears as a determining factor to propose more effective methods for evaluating intellectual capital in various economic sectors. Thus, it is expected that establishing the sector-purpose correlation will enrich the discussion on the use and management of intangible assets.