Intellectual capital is a term with various definitions in different theories of management and economics. Accordingly, its only truly neutral definition is as a debate over economic "intangibles". Ambiguous combinations of human capital, instructional capital and individual capital employed in productive enterprise are usually what is meant by the term, when it is used to actually refer to a capital asset whose yield is intellectual rights.

Such use is rare, however, and the term rarely or never appears in accounting proper - it refers to a debate, and to the assumed capital base that creates intellectual property, rather than an auditable style of capital.

Perhaps due to their industry focus, the term "intellectual capital" is employed mostly by theorists in information technology, innovation research, technology transfer and other fields concerned primarily with technology, standards, and venture capital. It was particularly prevalent in 1995-2000 as theories proliferated to explain the "dotcom boom" and high valuations.

A transitional term

Because there is little agreement on how the "intellectual" is an asset, it is not clear if the term has a future in the field, or will be subsumed by other ideas, e.g. "brand capital" - social trust that exists only via owned instructions - an intangible.

Formerly of Fortune, and currently the editor of the Harvard Business Review, Thomas Stewart is the journalist of record on Intellectual Capital.Fact: date=November 2007 He has been following its development since 1991. In his book Intellectual Capital (1997), Stewart introduces IC, offers a taxonomy for organizing it and makes the case for managing it.

Others have followed. For example, GartnerGroup in a series of research reports of 2001-2002 (see e.g. ¹), and Nick Bontis of McMaster University in several academic papers published in the Journal of Intellectual Capital.² Both approaches followed more or less Stewart's proposal, although with some variations: intellectual capital includes human capital (the talent base of the employees), "structural capital" (according to Bontis, "the non-human storehouses of information", while Gartner enlarges this to include other organizational knowledge) and "relational capital" (the knowledge embedded in business networks).

Baruch Lev documents "brand" as a new (seventh) form of capital. This seems to violate classical microeconomics basic model of the factors of production - and likely require major rethinking of microeconomics and political economy.Fact: date=July 2008

The anti-globalization movement and green economists seem to broadly share a critique of "brand" documented by Naomi Klein in her book "No Logo" - although from an economics viewpoint their proposals for mandatory labelling schemes and a retrenchment of national sovereignty (so called "brand versus flag" or "brand versus label" debates) seem to validate Lev's assumption that brand does in fact add genuine value: a flag, or a brand, or a label, economically, all signify social trust, albeit with different procedures of complaint, recourse, and enforcement.