Coupling with Standardisation and Diversity: Intellectual Capital Reporting Guidelines for European Universities

European universities have been immersed during the last decades in important transformation processes aiming to make them more autonomous, economically efficient and competitive. They have to demonstrate fine resource management and accountability in support of clearly defined and feasible goals, even more important during periods of financial crisis and budget cuts. From a managerial perspective, Intellectual Capital (IC) management and reporting can contribute to making the best use of available resources (Elena et al., 2011). In the realm of practice, an increasing number of universities and research centres in Europe have developed IC management and reporting models. However, their application has been, so far, based on voluntary basis. An important effort to provide a homogenous and comprehensive framework for managing and reporting IC in universities was developed by the Observatory of European Universities (Sanchez et al., 2009 and OEU, 2006). The Austrian case is a remarkable example since it has established a law that includes the compulsory delivery of an Intellectual Capital Report ("Wissensbilanz") (Altenburger and Schaffhauser-Linzatti 2006) by its publically funded universities since 2006. Currently, a project is being carried out in Romania, with the ultimate goal of preparing a guideline for applying IC reporting in Higher Education institutions. A series of Mutual Learning Workshops (MLW) are being organised (started in October 2012) by the Rumanian Agency for Education, Research and Innovation together with international experts. Learning from the Austrian case and from other initiatives, the MLWs are meant to discuss between researchers, practitioners, managers and policy-makers, how to design a guideline for IC reporting for Romanian Universities considering the national context and current reforms of the university system. The guideline should be also applicable for universities in other countries undergoing a reformation process of the university system. The paper will give an overview of international experiences with IC reporting of universities. As a practical case, the paper will present the first results of this on-going project and reflect on which methods are appropriate to report on IC in different types of European universities and to what extent is it possible and advisable to standardise IC models.