Redovisning och förvaltning av intellektuellt kapital : I kunskapsföretag och fotbollsklubbar

Sammanfattning: The business world of today is characterized by the fact that knowledge plays a far greater role than it did before in the companies’ production. In many companies, the human resources constitute the main part of the total assets. It can for example be the employees’ knowledge, competence or power of initiative. The human resources, also called the human capital, are volatile assets, which easily disappear when an employee leaves the company. It is therefore important for the companies to retain and tie up the knowledge as a form of infrastructure, also called the structural capital, and therefore prevent important information to be lost. The question is how different knowledge companies should act to tie up the human capital as structural capital. Because the human- and structural capital constitute such a great part of the companies’ resources, it can also be interesting to investigate the possibility to account for them in financial reports. Is the theory on the subject comparable with actual practices? In our study, we have interviewed three different kinds of knowledge-based companies; two football clubs and one IT-company. We have also interviewed a charted accountant to get an external view of the two types of businesses. Football clubs and IT-companies act under different conditions when it comes to the presentation of intellectual capital, which resulted in two different empirical perspectives on our research questions. The results of the study showed significant differences in attitude and the management of the human- and structural capital in football clubs and IT companies. The reason for the most restrictive accounting rules in the area is that it is particularly difficult to estimate the value of human- and structural capital. The empirical findings of this study confirm that. Especially the IT-company wanted to see better rules and methods to make it possible for them to present their real assets in a more correct way.