Intellectual Capital And Business Performance

With advent of knowledge-based era, knowledge will become the most basic production factors. Not traditional material capital but knowledge capital is most important for firms. The efficient knowledge management can promote the proliferation of organizational knowledge, and then knowledge capital, which ensure the continuing increase of profit while the return and proliferation of knowledge capital depends on its innovation. Although the voice advocating of knowledge management is more and more strong, many firms still hardly understand deeply the point of knowledge capital result of the effort on knowledge capital only focuses on the introduction and learn in China. In order to build the complete theory, the paper probes into the background and theoretical base, as well as the development history and present progress of knowledge capital. And then, the paper discusses the nature of firm in knowledge context, and points out that firm is the more efficient institution arrangement than market. Knowledge capital is the footstone of competition advantage and the source of profit.The paper puts stress on the composition of knowledge capital respectively, human capital, organizational capital and relationship capital under the knowledge-based theory of firm to explain the firms' difference, the source of extra profits, the scale (border) of firm and competition advantage. Meanwhile, the paper rebuilds demand and supply curves to investigate the route where every elements forms and the contribution to enterprise's performance, and gets some reasoning. In order to find out the impact and route of knowledge capital on firm's performance to test above reasoning, this paper analysis with SPSS the data gathered through questionnaire investigation and interview, and draws the following conclusion: the elements of knowledge capital interacts each other in different route; Human capital can exert positive or negative effect on firm's performance just only through organization capital and relationship capital, and relationship capital and organization capital influence performance of firm directly while human capitalacts on enterprise's performance indirectly; In term of independent degree of three elements influencing on performance, relationship capital is most strong, then is organization capital and weakest is human capital. In light of above conclusions, some suggestions on how to realize knowledge capital and management effectively are put forward.