HOW MUCH IS INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL WORTH FOR THE ORGANIZATION? Separating the measurement and evaluation of intellectual capital elements with evaluator functions at EMS companies

The purpose of the paper is to contribute to the use of evaluator and utility functions in order to increase the reliability of scorecard based intellectual capital (IC) measurement methods and to express and aggregate the utility of IC components to an organization. The conducted field experiment integrates the results of interviews with 23 brand name customers by examining the customer satisfaction measuring practice of service provider companies. Our main finding is that adequately calibrated evaluator functions assign perceived customer satisfaction to its scorecard based measured values and reduce the distortions of scorecard based measurements. The originality of the research lies in expressing and aggregating the utilities of IC components to the organization by interpreting the evaluator function as a kind of utility function. This application allows the joint use of financial valuation and scorecard based measurement in the same performance management system.