The assessment of the intellectual capital impact on the value creation process: a decision support framework for top management

This article proposes a framework designed to support the top management in the tactical and strategic planning of the investments on critical ICAs. The framework consists of a sequence of steps, which aim at assessing the organisational intellectual capital. The framework takes into consideration the impact of intellectual capital assets on the value creation process. The framework resorts to the analytic network process in order to synthesise the interdependences among intellectual capital assets and identify the individual impact of each intellectual capital asset. The implementation of the proposed framework provides managers with strategic considerations, which can be drawn from the results and compared through a synoptic analysis and through a cost/benefit analysis.