The past, present and future for intellectual capital research: an overview

When we started this project three years ago, we started with the aim “to provide an overview of Intellectual Capital (IC) in practice and beyond. It will focus on the role of IC in organizations and between organizations, institutions and beyond”. The Routledge Companions are similar to what some publishers call ‘handbooks’, being prestige reference works providing an overview of a whole subject area or sub-discipline, which survey the state of the discipline including emerging and cutting edge areas. The Routledge Companions produce a comprehensive, up to date, definitive reference that are usually cited as an authoritative source on the subject. Our goal in undertaking this project is to provide a collection of essays that address cross-cutting IC issues. We believe we have achieved our aims and our collected works should be of interest to people who want to understand IC from a variety of perspectives with a view that readers may or may not have background knowledge, as well as students who are learning to work with a particular aspect of IC and the management of knowledge. The material in this Routledge Companion relates not only to theory, but also to practice and case studies. We are proud that this book features leading academic, policy, and practitioner articles examining the latest developments in the field of IC. The contents are organized thematically into sections that reflect the five stages of IC research developments (Dumay et al., 2017). We believe no one stage is more important than another – the themes and stages provide a useful framework with which to present the 30 chapters, written by a variety of authors and covering a wide range of subject areas.