An Innovative Model for Evaluating National Intellectual Capital.

In modern economy, competitive advantage has moved from tangible and financial assets to intangible and nonfinancial assets named intellectual capital (IC). In this era, the society is base on knowledge resources as information, intellectual property, and experience. Intellectual Capital on national level is a rather recent line of research that has attracted interest of the academia and business environment with the purpose that country wins more and more strategic importance. However, there is a relatively common understanding the role of intellectual capital as the economic driver for creating national wealth and economic competitiveness. But how to evaluate the intellectual capital of the nation? The evaluation of the national intelectual capital is indeed a challenge and demand a strongly system of metrics to help find and manage that nations intangible assets, providing an overview of the wealth of the nation. In striving to gain ever more reliable knowledge on the effects of IC, however, we need the established measurement practices of the next generation. The models and approaches used until now for measuring national-level IC and its economic effects form a good basis for further development.The purpose of this paper is to develop an innovative model for evaluating nation intellectual capital, mainly in the context of creating competitive advantage of the nation. This paper is organized in five sections. Section 1 introduces the concept and of national intellectual capital from the perspective of various specialists. Section 2 shows the most important models for evaluating intellectual capital developed at national level. The Section 3 is devoted to the description of the proposed methodology and includes defining the components and metrics that has been developed to perform the evaluation of national intellectual capital model. Section 4 presents the testing and validation of the model for evaluating national intellectual capital in East Europe. Finally, Section 5 presents the preliminary conclusions. This development model helps nations to identify and evaluate the intellectual capital in terms of coping in the knowledge economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]