The missing link: developing intellectual capital through corporate heritage practices

Purpose The study explores how corporate heritage practices support the development of firms’ intellectual capital (IC), addressing a research gap in the intersection of these two concepts. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts an exploratory qualitative design, based on a single embedded case study of the Portus Lab project, a public-funded innovation network in an Italian village, founded to provide heritage services to firms and territories. Data were collected through 22 semi-structured interviews with owners, managers and heritage experts from firms and institutions, complemented by participant observation and project documents. An abductive thematic analysis was conducted, adopting the entropic intellectual capital model as the study’s analytical framework. Findings The paper makes two main contributions to the IC literature. First, it introduces potential corporate heritage capital as a form of potential IC rooted in the firm’s historical legacy. Second, it proposes the heritage-driven entropic intellectual capital model. The model suggests how corporate heritage practices might operationalise historically grounded potential IC into human, structural and relational capital, acting as non-linear integrators. At the same time, these practices may serve as microfoundations through which dynamic capabilities unfold to create value from operational IC and to renew potential IC over time. Originality/value The paper offers the first explicit theorisation of the relationship between corporate heritage and intellectual capital. In doing so, it advances novel insights into how corporate heritage practices may be mobilised to operationalise, develop and renew IC over time.