Valuing the future: intellectual capital supplements at Skandia

Abstract Skandia’s intellectual capital supplements are pioneering forms of communication that inform internal as well as external readers of the attempts to manage and create value from intellectual resources. These supplements to the financial accounting statement communicate not only in numbers but also in stories and illustrations about the challenges facing the firm. They help develop a narrative for the path ahead for Skandia as a ` ̀ capable’ ’ firm that thrives through intellectual resources found in humans, structures and relations. In this paper we discuss how this is possible and we suggest that intellectual capital statements are not only new types of communication; they also anticipate new ` ̀ contracts’ ’ between labour and management where employees are persuaded to help managers craft the strategies to be pursued in the marketplace of the future. Not may people have been selected as ` ̀ Brain of the year’’, but Leif Edvinsson was in 1998. At the time he was Intellectual Capital Director at Skandia AFS and was awarded this prize for his work to develop intellectual capital statements1. In 1994, Skandia began to publish a series of intellectual capital supplements in addition to its financial accounting statement. It is rumoured