Intellectual capital, knowledge management, innovation, and organizational performance: A literature review study

Abstract

In recent years, knowledge or more broadly intellectual capital (IC) has been considered an organization's most important resource, and its effective management is a key factor to an organization's success. One of the widely recognized approaches is knowledge management (KM), as KM is the systematic and organized utilization of the intellectual power of an organization to achieve efficiency, ensure competitive advantage, and encourage innovation. KM as a science has become a topic of increasing interest to many people as a tool to help enterprises work more effective, especially to improve innovation capability and organizational performance (OP). Although there have been many studies and publications on KM, however, there are still many unanswered questions. Specifically, how to transform IC resource into innovation capability and OP through KM operation is still an issue to be explored and controversial, especially in the context of small and medium enterprises. This study was carried out through reading and analyzing the content of 372 academic articles related to the concepts of IC, KM, innovation, and OP, with the aim of systematizing the concepts and discussing research results on the relationship between concepts to identify research gaps. From that analysis result, the article proposes a research framework and model.