Managing risk with intellectual capital statements

The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical research study which took a novel examination of the relationship between risk and transparency with regards to a company's intellectual capital assets. The objective of this study is to evaluate how the systematic and idiosyncratic risk of publicly traded companies correlates with the degree of available information regarding their intellectual capital statements. Intellectual capital is measured within the framework of a rating system that includes 44 parameters within eight focus areas. These data were collected from key informants at eight publicly traded IT companies in Sweden. The results show a negative correlation between idiosyncratic risk and transparency and a positive correlation between market risk and transparency. However, the correlation between risk and transparency may partly be explained by organization size. This study was based on a small set of firms within one country so generalizability is limited. The suggested methodology of intellectual capital measurement has since been used by over 400 organizations across four different continents. This methodology consists of both qualitatively metrics as well as quantitative metrics that are then triangulated together to test various hypotheses.