Impact of Intellectual Capital on International Trade: Knowledge Management and Business Processes as Intermediaries

The global international trade market is changeable and highly competitive. In order to discover the market competitiveness of trading companies, we develop a second-order research model to explore the impact of intellectual capital on a company’s performance through the intermediaries of knowledge management and business processes. The main purpose of this study is to discover the roles that knowledge management and business process capabilities play when companies introduce intellectual capital. We used a five-part questionnaire to conduct our research. Structural equation modeling techniques were used to analyze the research model, and we used PLS-SEM for data analysis. The analysis results show that the direct impact of intellectual capital on company performance is not significant (path coefficient is 0.08), and if a company only implements knowledge management it will have no significant effect on performance (path coefficient is 0.06). However, these two factors do have a significant impact on company performance through business process capability. Therefore, the results show that knowledge management and business processes mediate intellectual capital to affect a company’s performance and lead to the better identification of the successful elements of competitive export trade strategies in dynamic business environments. Moreover, the results also show that the factor loading of information capital (weight=0.63) in intellectual capital is much higher than the other aspects of intellectual capital. That is, companies must prioritize information capital when investing in intellectual capital.