Human Capital's Explicitation Conceptual Framework

One of the three pillars of knowledge economy, the Intellectual Capital (IC) emerges as a full scientific discipline on which more and more the scientists' researches are concentrated, the professionals' efforts are multiplied, the knowledge-intensive organizations' strategies are focalized and the governments' policies are oriented. The IC, an area of which the extent is in full growth and the importance of which does not stop taking every day of the largeness owing to the fact that it is directly related to the organizations growth, even of nations (i.e. National IC). IC is seen a wide and rich field but also recent whose the advance of research work is still left at the level of its premises. It revolves around three key-concepts: knowledge, its source and its relationship to the organization added value. Thus, for many reasons, the human source and knowledge (i.e. Human Capital HC) is fully distinguished from other types of knowledge capitals. The HC is the origin of all knowledge, a big part of which is tacit and does not belong to the organization. It is studied in several fields: philosophy and epistemology, cognitive science, knowledge management, HC Management and organizational learning. Each domain approaches it under a certain point of view and for certain objectives. In our work, the emphasis is put on the development of a conceptual and software framework for the explicitation of HC's tacit knowledge. This requires at first (i) an accurate comprehension leading to a relatively relevant conception, (ii) techniques and approaches allowing the explicitation of this tacit knowledge and finally (iii) a representation model supporting the explicitation of human tacit knowledge. In this work, one is interested in the third point that will serve as primitives and tools for the first two points. This work will present an introduction to the importance and weight occupied by the IC and HC in the current organizations' environment. It will draw up in a second section the research identified around the HC and will expose the various models of knowledge representation in a third section; then it will provide a conceptual framework based on the notion of the concept to support the explicitation of HC tacit knowledge. The notion of the concept, according to cognitive scientists, is the key-element of the process of reasoning and reflection used by human to form and to formulate the human mental ideas and thoughts. Even its history is seen linked with the history of human intellectual concern. The concept is for the knowledge that knowledge is for the IC. The fourth section concludes the paper with a discussion and our futureworks.