Relationship Between Intellectual Capital And Growth Ability Based On Life Cycle Theory

With the advent of the era of knowledge economy, knowledge has become an important resource to promote enterprise growth, gradually replacing the physical capital such as monetary funds, raw materials. Intellectual capital is the intangible capital with the knowledge as the key content. At the same time, they must have a certain growth ability to get rapid development and maintain competitive advantage. Growth ability is the driving force for the enterprise to maintain a strong competitive advantage and have sustainable development. Since the 1850 s, the enterprise life cycle theory has developed as one of the important theoretical researches on enterprise management. Enterprise has different organizational characteristics in different life cycle stages. Therefore, this article, based on the perspective of enterprise life cycle theory, divides the Chinese high-tech public enterprises into different stages of life cycle, explores how the internal factors of intellectual capital impact the enterprise growth ability in different life cycle stages.This paper chooses 44 Chinese high-tech public enterprises from 2006 to 2013 as the research object. First, adopt different evaluation index and method to describe the life cycle stage of high-tech public enterprises, intellectual capital and the development level of growth ability. Second, use the factor analysis to measure intellectual capital and growth ability of the sample enterprise through the SPSS. Third, analyze the causal relationship among the three variables; explore how the internal factors of intellectual capital impact the enterprise growth ability and the regulating effect of enterprise life cycle. The conclusions are as followings:(1) the sample enterprises have lower development level in intellectual capital, but stronger level in growth ability.(2) The internal factors of intellectual capital significantly impact the enterprise growth ability.(3) The internal factors of intellectual capital play different role in influencing growth ability in different stage of life cycle.(4) In the growth stage, unstructured external intellectual capital has positive and significant influence on the enterprise competition ability.(5) In the maturing stage, unstructured external intellectual capital has a significant negative impact, while intellectual capital structured and unstructured internal intellectual capital begin to have positive effect on enterprise growth ability.(6) In the stagnant stage, structured intellectual capital has a negative impact on the profitability of the enterprise. And unstructured external intellectual capital is the major intellectual capital element to improve enterprise profitability.