State of the Art and Introduction of the Project

In the last decade, the complexity and the turbulence of the economic and socio-cultural scenario has highlighted that the competitiveness of the firms, systems of firms and, in general, of any organizational system is based not only on the traditional tangible assets and financial capital, but great relevance is played by the intangible resources, in the form of knowledge assets, able to create sustained competitive advantages (Delios and Beamish, 2001; Drucker, 1993; Hudson, 1993; Itami,1987; McGaughey, 2002; Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998; Stewart, 1991; 1997; Teece, 2000).

New theories of strategic management such as the Resource-Based View (Barney, 1991; Drucker, 1959; Penrose, 1959; Peteraf, 1993; Rumelt, 1984; Wernerfelt, 1984), the Competence-Based View (Davenport and Prusak, 1998; Prahalad and Hamel, 1990) and the Knowledge-Based View (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995), during the time, have introduced in the economic and managerial literature new theoretical planning, frameworks, techniques and tools finalized to examine, in direct or indirect way, the increasing importance of the knowledge resources for organizational performance improvements.

Coherently with the wide acknowledgement of knowledge as a strategic resource for organizations competitiveness, the concept of Intellectual Capital (IC) has been introduced and developed as new interpretative category of such resource. It can be considered a conceptualization of the cognitive and intangible resources that answers in a better way to the managerial needs to have interpretative and operative tools for their identification and evaluation. In particular, different studies have addressed the issue of the relevance of IC and how it can contribute to improve business performance and create value for organisations (Andriessen, 2005; Brooking, 1996, 1997; Edvinsson and Malone, 1997; Hall, 1992, 1993; Marr and Schiuma, 2001; Roos and Roos, 1997; Sullivan, 1998; Sveiby, 1997).

In the last few years, coherently with the wide acknowledgement of knowledge as a strategic resource for organizations competitiveness, the economic and managerial literature is increasingly inquiring the role and the relevance of IC as group of knowledge assets not only referred to business organizations, but also referred to public organizations (Carmeli and Tishler, 2004). In this perspective, it is interested to analyse these issue within health care organizations. However, referred to public sector organizations and specifically in health care organizations, it is possible to highlight that the issues regarding the role of IC for organizational performance improvement are still in their infancy. Moreover, despite the growing awareness of the relevance of the knowledge assets and IC as key value drivers for competitiveness, the works have been done to date have largely taken the form of consulting reports and case study analysis, it has been not focalized to analyze how IC components, independently, complementarily and interactively, may or may not enhance the organizational systems’ value creation capabilities; to explore and test the potential relationships among knowledge assets, IC, value creation and sustained competitive advantage; and to provide public policy and managerial implications to support organizational systems in value delivering. Finally, international management literature provides different models to assess and manage the cognitive and intangible resources but they still present numerous theoretical and operative shortcomings. On a theoretical point of view, they do not present a common system of indicators and it do not permit to do comparisons among different organizations. Moreover, they seem not satisfying the more relevant attributes of the performance measurement systems as defined in the literature. On an operative point of view it is possible to highlight that, although some national health care organizations are trying to activate a process of development of IC measuring and reporting systems, their definition and implementation is still unsatisfied. The present research wish to fill these gaps through the definition of an interpretative framework to analyze the links between IC and value creation within health care organizations; to develop an approach to identify and assess cognitive resources and assets of the health care organizations; to develop economic, political and managerial techniques and tools for the understanding of the cause-effect relationships between knowledge assets and organizational systems’ performance; and finally through the definition of a normative framework able to drive managers and decision-makers towards the definition of managerial and public policy initiatives for knowledge assets and Intellectual Capital development designed and implemented in order to improve targeted performance.