What is the value of intellectual capital?

What are the best sources from which to draw evidence about intellectual capital (IC) and its value to organisations? This paper attempts to answer this question looking first to the literature for approaches to valuing intellectual capital, but finding that many methods have limitations. From reviewing the literature, the researchers turned to knowledge management practitioners in an attempt to reveal how organisations value their intellectual capital in practice and found that for the most part (in the organisations studied) they did not. Drawing on the evidence from interviews with practitioners the paper highlights a gap between the IC accounting models elaborated in the literature and operational practices. The paper concludes that there is an absence of linking mechanisms between knowledge management and intellectual capital and that this may be located in the differences between valuing and measuring and the importance of these two processes to the discrete constituencies involved.