Futurizing Intellectual Capital Theory to Uncover Pertinent and Unexplored Horizons

The need to understand the criticality of knowledge and related resources has led to scholarly discussions, and the intellectual capital (IC)-based view of firms has gained increasing importance in the contemporary management literature. Manifold impacts of IC on organizational performance have been widely evidenced, and management mechanisms for various IC dimensions can be found in most established organizations. As research is a strongly path-dependent activity, IC research naturally leans on classical frameworks and conceptualizations constructed a decade or even several years ago. However, large-scale changes in companies’ operating environments, such as digitalization, the sustainability crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic, and related forced move to remote work demand new knowledge resources. In this paper, we strongly argue that normative approaches for conceptualizing IC and its performance relevance would benefit from updating. Furthermore, the new post-pandemic world of work requires novel understandings of IC. To spur new thinking and offer ways forward, we develop a theoretical model that indicates selected ideas for a revised understanding of IC and its role in organizational viability. We suggest important new issues to be examined in terms of various IC elements, organizational performance dimensions, and moderators of relationships among these dimensions. The paper contributes to IC research by constructing a revised model of IC that can be used to generate topical research models to be further developed and tested in theoretical and empirical studies.