Abstract: Despite the widely recognised importance of intellectual capital as a vital source of competitive advantage, there is still little understanding of how organisations actually combine their components to drive value. The purpose of this study is to examine the interrelationships among intellectual capital components within the Portuguese banking context by extending a study completed by Bontis. Several paths are identified that drive towards superior performance. Various models are assessed using a Partial Least Squares (PLS) approach given its advantages in dealing with complex models and its predictive capability. Empirical findings from this study support the proposition that intellectual capital is a driver of organisational value, but only in certain combinations.

Evolving information and knowledge has impacted all organisations, including academic libraries. This has made knowledge management become important. The conventional function of academic libraries is to collect, process, disseminate, store and utilise information to provide service to the university community. However, the environment in which academic libraries operate today is changing. Academic libraries are part of the university and its organisational culture. Whatever affects universities has an impact on academic libraries. As a result, the role of academic libraries is changing to provide the competitive advantage for the parent universities. The success of academic libraries depends on their ability to utilise information and knowledge of its staff to better serve the needs of the academic community. This requires academic librarians to reappraise their functions, expand their roles and responsibilities to effectively contribute and meet the needs of a large and diverse university community. Knowledge management is a viable means in which academic libraries could improve their services in the present knowledge era. This is a report of the results of a case study conducted to establish the ways in which the academic librarians of the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg Libraries could add value to their services by engaging with knowledge management. 1.

Intangible assets form part of the true value of organisations. These assets are produced from various forms of capital other than financial capital, which are located in the intellectual, structural and customer domains of organisations. This paper reports the findings from 15 cases from an empirical study of large UK service organisations to which we applied the concepts of social, intellectual and cultural capital as analytical tools to interpret the data concerned with intangible assets. We explore these forms of capital through identifying their origins and their functions. The paper identifies links between the value of these forms of capital and reports on how this value may be measured with pragmatic measures. The paper also considers the feasibility of aggregating the full value of organisations into their individual national economies. The research has produced two paradoxes relating to the development of intangible assets to test in future research.

Abstract. Knowledge management can support industrial research processes. Indeed, these industrial research processes are situated between a system of operational units, requiring and using research results, and a system of technological providers and academic laboratories. The knowledge flow between these systems is exposed to certain industrial constraints. The research center needs to optimize internal and external knowledge flows. In this purpose we identified a knowledge typology of industrial researchers. Based on a research process model, the knowledge typology and a theoretical knowledge management model we propose a portal solution. This portal solution allows manipulating information and knowledge more flexible in order to assure a certain dynamic for the knowledge management system. In future work we will integrate a knowledge evaluation process to focus on this dynamical aspect. This article discusses the introduction of a knowledge management system for industrial research processes at the EADS Corporate Research Center. 1

Innovations and Experience Economy: A tool for rural food sector competitiveness and rural development? Paper by

This paper aims to gain a better understanding of KMS success. Based on the absorptive capacity theory, we develop a research model to explain how the use of KMS increases organizational performance by increasing the organizational absorptive capacity and the higher order capabilities. The absorptive capacity plays an important role in transforming KMS usage into agility and innovativeness and the sequent organizational performance. The model is empirically tested with a survey. The results support the mediation effect of absorptive capacity on the use of KMS and the two higher order organizational capabilities, the mediation effects of the two superior organizational capabilities on the relationship between KMS usage and organizational performance and the mediation effect on the link between absorptive capacity and performance.