Intellectual Capital Benchmarking System
CADIC's Intellectual Capital Benchmarking System will provide a new method to compare individual Intellectual Capital configurations across SMEs (strengths and weaknesses etc.) and will be employed to bring SMEs together on an to find “best practice transfer partner”, find partner with similar Intellectual Capital problems, find partner with similar Intellectual Capital solutions,
etc. This contributes to CADIC’s infrastructure for growing and proliferating open and extensible clusters in a business-to-business environment, where Intellectual Capital can flow to the mutual benefit of all concerned.
The Intellectual Capital Benchmarking system will be based on the InCaS methodology which provides a standardised procedure and structure for individual, company-specific Intellectual Capital Statements (ICS).
The data for IC Benchmarking will either come from a full-fledged ICS implementation in the respective company or – to make it easier to get started with IC-based on cross-organizational collaboration – from an “Intellectual Capital Quick Check”, providing an online and offline questionnaire to very quickly assess standard IC factors that have been validated in the InCaS project. These sets of data will be stored, normalised and analysed in a special database system. The normalisation of the individual Intellectual Capital data will be the key to make qualitative assessments comparable and to use this data for two main purposes:
1) the descriptive comparison of a single company’s Intellectual Capital assessment with a peer group (e.g. same size, branch/sector, region, strategy etc.),
2) to match potential partners for collaborative knowledge- and best-practice-transfer or other forms of collaboration.
IC Benchmarking may take place on different levels adding value for different scopes and purposes: individual Intellectual Capital data of different companies in an existing cluster can be aggregated on the cluster level to find out about potential gaps concerning the intellectual resource base of the cluster (this may also be supported by a new Intellectual Capital assessment on the emergent cluster level). Based on that, well-aimed activities to grow and strengthen the cluster by actively inviting new partners to close those specific gaps in Intellectual Capital may be initiated from inside the cluster. Also, cluster-to-cluster comparisons become possible for evaluating the whole CADIC network and to assess the cluster performance compared to the performance of other clusters.