Intellectual Capital Management in the Context of Internationalization

Abstract

There are several reasons motivating the companies to become international and some models explaining how companies are internationalized. The purpose of our research is to investigate the association between the elements of intellectual capital and firms' internationalization and whether differences exist between the internationalization processes of companies from different countries. In the first part of the research, we examined the internationalization motives and the internationalization models from the literature, and define the internationalization models which most completely takes intellectual capital of a company into consideration. In the second part, we defined intellectual capital elements and analyzed how they can be linked to the internationalization models chosen. In the third part, using comparative case analysis method, we investigated the internationalization processes and the intellectual capitals of two international companies, and discussed the differences.