Non-profit strategy in the knowledge economy: An intellectual capital perspective

Intellectual capital (IC) represents the collective knowledge that is embedded in the personnel, organisational routines and network relationships of an organisation. IC is therefore applicable to any organisation regardless of whether it is profit oriented or not in the knowledge economy. In the case of non-profit organisations (NPOs), when the level of IC is increased, non-profit managers are likely to enhance their ability to make better decisions. Improved decision making can enhance organisational performance. Thus IC is an important resource that NPOs need to develop in order to gain sustained strategic advantages. The original contribution of the paper is twofold. Firstly, very little systematic research has focused on applying the concept of IC within the non-profit context. This paper contributes to filling this gap by building a nascent body of literature suggesting that IC can be utilised as a non-profit strategic management conceptual framework, particularly in the highly competitive non-profit environment. Secondly, this paper argues that the IC concept is more effective within the non-profit context as compared to other strategic management concepts including SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis, industrial organisation (I/O), resource-based view (RBV), knowledge-based view (KBV) and balanced scorecard (BSC).