Giovanni Bronzetti

Intellectual capital reporting in the Italian non‐profit sector: analysing a case study

Purpose - The main aim of the article is to analyze the IC reporting practices of an Italian non-profit organization (NPO), the ANPAS Piemonte, selected as it is one of the few cases with a longstanding experience in issuing IC reports. Design/methodology/approach - This is an exploratory, qualitative case study focused on a single case study organization. The study took place over eight years. The case description and analysis are based on the IC reports published by the company. Findings – This paper concludes that the ANPAS Piemonte is an organization that has expended considerable focus and effort in developing an IC measurement and reporting model. It has a well-established IC reporting procedure, but a comprehensive view of IC and of the synergies among IC subcategories is lacking. Research limitations/implications – The study focuses on a single case study of a NPO providing public interest services in Italy. The main limit therefore lies in the difficulties in generalizing the ANPAS Piemonte’s experience to other NPOs. From the IC management point of view, the distinction between different industries may be as important as the profit orientation as well as the operations of the third sector may vary across countries. Originality/value - The contribution of the articles lies in its analysis of the IC reports of an organization in the context of the NP sector, as few prior studies have examined the third sector from an ICR perspective. Post-print (i.e. final draft post-refereeing) ‘This article is (c) Emerald Group Publishing and permission has been granted for this version to appear here (http://ssrn.com/abstract=2187221). Emerald does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

The application of intellectual capital reports in local authorities: analysis and empirical evidence

This paper aims to investigate intellectual capital management in a public organisation as the Chambers of Commerce; in particular, whether and to what extent intellectual capital contributes to overall accountability and what role intellectual capital plays as a management tool. In order to answer these questions, the paper examines a case study, the Chamber of Commerce of Verbania Cusio Ossola that, at present, is one of the few in Italy, which prepares an intellectual capital report, by dedicating to it a special section in its social budget, where IC is reported. The paper also describes the intellectual capital report used in the Chamber of Commerce, the information supplied and the role of intellectual capital management in this context explaining the value added it brings to the community.

Business succession and Intellectual Capital Management in family firms

Family businesses are institutions in which two seemingly disparate social units (i.e., families and businesses) are highly integrated. This connection extends to succession across generations and while natural, this can be a difficult process. The founder, thanks to his long stay in the family business, has a substantial amount of tacit knowledge related to the firm which can often determine business success. In the succession process it is important to diffuse and manage overall knowledge, or intellectual capital, to the successor. This study attempts to contribute to the literature casting some light on the business succession in a family firm informed by an intellectual capital perspective. Starting from these theoretical principles, through a case study analysis approach, the research investigates how human and relational resources are managed in the business succession process and how the process is communicated to the external environment and therefore how small family firms can maintain and increase their competitive advantage thus reducing the risk of failure during the succession process.

Innovative IC Framework in the Non-Profit Sector

The importance of intellectual capital in the non-profit sector generates the need to measure its role in the value creation process. The purpose of the paper is to study the application of intellectual capital within the non-profit sector, by turning attention to resources such as: knowledge, experience, and skills. Organizations, which are able to increase the knowledge of their staff and transform this knowledge into skills to improve services, can easily meet users’ needs and, thereby, become competitive. This contribution proposes to study how people’s knowledge can contribute to increasing social value, which is the non–profit organization’s aim. Furthermore, the goal is to demonstrate how collaboration between staff and volunteers is essential to professional services. Finally, the research proposes a conceptual framework in which intellectual capital helps in defining the strategic issues, which non–profit organizations must tackle in order to achieve their social programs.

A Framework to Measure Intellectual Capital

New technologies have changed the structure of companies shifting the focus of creating value from material resources to intangibles. The competitive advantage is increasingly reliant on the presence of specific intangibles such as knowledge, experience, communication skills that are the main source of competitive advantage. Among the intangibles based on knowledge, intellectual capital certainly occupies a prominent place. In recent years the increasing complexity that characterized the business management influenced companies to adopt new models of reporting and accounting, taking into account issues and intangible factors not considered so far with the right attention. The objective of this work, starting with a review of the existing literature on intellectual capital, intends not only to identify the most important intangibles within enterprises and classify them according to the three blocks which intellectual capital is divided (human capital, structural and relational capital), but also to show a number of indicators that can help them measure. Therefore the aim of the work is to build an integrated framework containing appropriate intellectual capital indicators useful to represent and measure this resource within companies. The sample is made up of the Italian companies listed on the stock exchange operating in different sectors, for the period 2011–2014.

Intellectual capital reporting: a knowledge tool to coordinate a group of regional non-profit organisations

Whilst many organisations worldwide have stopped disclosing intellectual capital (IC), to the best of our knowledge, the only longstanding NPO still measuring, managing and reporting its IC is a large Italian non-profit organisation (NPO), ANPAS Piemonte. The main aim of the article is thus to investigate the reasons why ANPAS Piemonte continues to deal with IC, to examine the determinants of this choice, the costs and the benefits management gets from IC measurement, management and reporting. In other words, the paper aims to explore the IC reporting process from an internal, managerial point of view. The paper employs a case study methodology to address its aim and the main investigation tool on the IC reporting process was semi-structured interviews to the management of ANPAS Piemonte that launched and continues to carry on the IC project within the investigated NPO.

Does board diversity affect firm performance? Evidence from the Italian financial sector

The aim of the study is to examine the effect of diversity in the board of directors on the performance of the listed Italian financial institutions. The sample is a data set of 177 firm-year observations covering 2011 to 2014. The performance of the firm is measured by Tobins Q while board diversity is analysed considering the percentage of female and foreign directors on the board (or their conjoint presence as a proxy of overall demographic diversity) and task-diversity is measured by board interlocking directorship and busy directors. Findings suggest that female directors have no effect on firm performance. Foreign directors and interlocking directorship have, instead, a positive statistically significant relationship with performance while we find a negative statistically significant relationship between busy directors and performance. When we consider the overall demographic diversity on the board we observe that it is positively and significantly related to the performance of the financial firm.

An innovative model for a sustainability report in no-profit organisations

After a review of the literature, the research aims to build a sustainability report for NPOs through a set of economic, environmental and social indicators based on best international practice. Then the report will be applied to a voluntary service centre (CSV) which, in terms of function and organisation, over a wide range, contains all the social and economic environmental variables to be monitored in any NPOs. The findings appear to suggest an innovative model of sustainability report for NPOs with a significant set of indicators that offer a new disclosure of the activity carried on by the organisation. The work is tested only on a limited number of NPOs which can be extended in the future. Then, as there are many entities similar to CSV around Europe, it is necessary also to set up the model in other countries.

The Impact of Corporate Governance on Internet Financial Reporting in Concentrated Ownership Companies

In the context of agency theory this study investigates the effect of corporate governance (CG) on Internet Financial Reporting (IFR) disclosure in a concentrated ownership environment, such as Italy. We hypothesize that IFR may be explained in term of increasing transparency in order to defend minority shareholder interest, so we predict, and find, a positive association between the extent of a firm’s IFR and its CG and a negative association between IFR and ownership structure. CG is measured by ownership structure, using as a proxy the share held by the first three major shareholders and by managerial ownership, and by board composition, captured through the incidence of independent director (IND) and of a Non-Executive Chair (NEC). IFR is measured taking into consideration the content and format of information present in Investor Relations sections.