• Accumulation and Interaction of Intellectual Capitals: A Case Study of Technology-driven Service Company

Abstract

In knowledge economy, the market value and accounting value of companies may differ. To explain this difference, scholars propose the concept of intellectual capital. Therefore, most of the intellectual capital literatures focus on the definition and evaluation of various types of intellectual capitals, but only few has discussed the formation and dynamics of them. To fill this research gap, this study conceptually constructs the dynamic process of intellectual capitals by the theories from knowledge creation and organizational learning literatures, and provides an interpretive case study of the largest taxi franchise fleet in Taiwan. This qualitative case study will explain how this technology-driven service company transforms the flows of informational knowledge into stocks of intellectual capitals, and discuss the dynamic process of the interactions among various types of intellectual capitals. Basically, intellectual capital can be divided into human capital and organizational capital which is owned by the company and can be further divided into process capital, innovation capital, and relational capital. We find that the company will extract the be- havioral information of the taxi drivers (human capital) by data mining, design the software (process capital) of on-air queuing system by the extracted information, promote the company brand (relational capital) and dispatching platform by the collective efforts of taxi drivers, and finally accumulate the ca- pacity (innovation capital) to create an innovative dispatching system and new business model. Based on the insights from these findings, we introduce eight propositions for further examination. This case not only illustrates the dynamics of intellectual capitals, but also provides a context for the conversation among knowledge creation, organizational learning, and intellectual capital literatures.

Keywords: Intellectual Capital, Knowledge Creation, Service Innovation