Intellectual Capital and Knowledge Management in Collaborative Networks

Nowadays there is an increasing trend for grouping Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in Collaborative Networks (CN). This phenomenon results from the SMEs' necessity of sharing capacities and knowledge to face the world-wide market in order to create new products or services and to open new markets. This paper regards CN as entities generating innovations. Therefore, it focuses on their inherent need to measure their intellectual capital and to manage their knowledge flow. The main contribution of this work focuses in the following aspects: i) to explain the existing relationship between the Collaborative Networks, Knowledge Management and Intellectual Capital concepts, and to propose two new concepts supporting them: Collaborative Knowledge Management (CKM) and Collaborative Intellectual Capital Management (CICM). These new proposed concepts arose from the following foundations: the Intellectual Capital Management (ICM), considered at the highest business strategy level and focused in the creation and extraction of value (Wiig, 1997a and Edinsson, 1997 mentioned in Zhou, 2003) and Knowledge Management (KM), which is focused on developing tactical and operative activities related to knowledge, in order to facilitate its creation, capture, transformation and use (Wiig, 1997a mentioned in Zhou, 2003); ii) the necessity to sensibilize about the Measurement and Management of the Intellectual Capital in Collaborative Networks concept, for being one of the recent years' organizational growing trends, due to the increasing need to unify capacities in order to compete in the global market. This paper shows a case study of the IBEROEKA Network (Science and Technology Manager Organism of 21 Ibero-American countries) describing its present situation, and showing how the members of this network can improve their competitive position through the intellectual capital information and KM in order to manage it as an inducer for innovation, creating an additional sub-level in the network comprised by SMEs, universities and scientific institutions of each involved country in this network. This proposed improvement can even provide new intangible and more valuable assets towards the creation of a Network of Virtual Collaboration IBEROEKA for Innovation, whose functionality would be supported by an information technologies' application system within a collaborative work. The proposed improvement also considers the development of automated processes of Knowledge Management and Measurement of the Intellectual Capital.