Wired for innovation: how information technology is reshaping the economy by Erik Brynjolfsson & Adam Saunders

Author:Erik Brynjolfsson & Adam Saunders [Brynjolfsson, Erik & Saunders, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Technology & Engineering, Computers, Information Management, General, E-Commerce, Industrial Technology, Information Technology, Management Information Systems, Technological innovations - Economic aspects, Technological innovations, Economic aspects, Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780262013666
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2009-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

5

Organizational

Capital

While the studies in chapter 4 document the complementarities between technology and workplace practices, we believe the next step is to conceptualize these practices as an asset, which we call organizational capital. We like to think of a fi rm’s organizational capital as its stock of non-tradable intangible assets, which conceptually have some similarities to physical assets. The intangible stock of assets takes time to develop, because, by defi nition, it cannot be bought on the market. Dierickx and Cool (1989, p. 1510) defi ned these kinds of assets as “nontradeable, nonimitable, and nonsubstitutable.” A successful company may have taken years to build its intangible asset stock to what it is today. Firms can either build up their intangible capital assets by making complementary investments or drain them by not continually innovating and redesigning their business processes as they become outdated.

Measuring intangible assets has important implications for management, because we often see that high-

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.