The intellectual capital in the firm; knowledge that can be used to generate wealth.

Abstract

This final degree project is about showing in general terms, the great importance of the intangible assets in the firms, and how they can be manage in order to provide economic profits to the companies that are able to make a good use of them. The way to make a profitable use of the intangible assets is called intellectual capital; term that we are going to develop through our final project degree. To show the impact of the intellectual capital in a real firm, we are going to apply a part of an intellectual capital model in a company of the audit sector, and we are going to see, the grade of intellectual capital it has, and then, from the negative aspects that we will obtain, we will propose improvement terms. So, this final project degree is divided into five big blocks, first of all, an introductory block, where we are going to make a small summary of the work done in general terms, we are also going to introduce the main topic: intellectual capital, and finally, we will end up this part describing a justification of why I selected this topic for my final project degree and the objectives and subobjectives that I hope to fulfill with the realization of the same. We have named the second section as ‘Theoretical framework’; this part is where we made an analytical review of the intellectual capital, we explained the definition, the most important models that people have developed in terms of intellectual capital, and some interesting points about the intellectual capital. To finish this block, we will explain ‘Intellectus model’, the model we have applied in the company to do the practical part. To do this, we took as principal references, the intellectual capital publications that made Edvinsson and Steward in 1997 and Annie Brooking in 1998, a part from other authors that we have read during the entire project. As a third block, we applied the human capital part from the Intellectus model (one of the models to measure the intellectual capital) to a real firm in order to check the level of intellectual capital that a leading company in audit world has. We also show here, the sector of this company, the sample we have, and then how we collected the data with the variables we used. The fourth block is where we are going to show the data we obtained once applied the variables to the company, the results between the real data and the ! 2! desire data that a manager gave for us, with this comparison, we will come to a conclusion, whether the company has a good level of intellectual capital or not; a conclusion that we are going to explain in block five. The fifth and last block, it is a section where we are going to explain the results we obtained, we will also talk about the limitations we had in order to do the project and future job lines, where we will recommend some aspects to the company once we have analyzed the intellectual capital result in order to improve its intellectual capital level and we would encourage members of the audit sector where we did the study to keep always a relationship with Intellectus model and so with intellectual capital. Finally, to end this fifth block I show my personal opinion of the model and about the research.