Intellectual Capital, Innovation and Performance: a Systematic Review of the Literature

This article provides a systematic review of the literature on the complex relationships
between intellectual capital, innovation and performance. Although these concepts are clearly
intertwined, there has been so far and to the best of our knowledge, no attempt to
systematically review and integrate the literature examining the relationships between them.
Two main streams of literature emerge: on the one hand, some literature focuses on the
economic and financial effects of intellectual capital and its components on performance and
on the other hand, a small set of survey-based studies aims to delineate these effects adopting
a multidimensional approach to performance. Besides these two streams, there is a wealth of
literature exploring the effect of isolated element of human, structural or relational capital on
performance. Nevertheless, these studies rarely refer to these concepts directly and it is
therefore contended that using the concept of intellectual capital may provide interesting
insights to illuminate the complex relationships between firms’ resources and activities to
leverage its intangible assets, innovation and performance. In doing so, it provides an
intellectual capital oriented framework to capture the distinctive features of innovation at firm
level and hence contributes to the scarce stream of literature focusing on better identifying
and delineating innovation effects on performance.