The balanced scorecard and intangible assets: similar ideas, unaligned concepts

Abstract

With their most recent publications on the balanced scorecard, Kaplan and Norton have focused on the learning and growth perspective in an attempt to clarify its constituent parts, as they acknowledge that many organizations struggle with what to include in this perspective. For that reason Kaplan and Norton introduce the concept of intangible assets as the content of the learning and growth perspective. They classify intangible assets into human capital, information capital, and organization capital. However, it is believed that this latest attempt to evolve the balanced scorecard might have an adverse effect. This article outlines how Kaplan and Norton failed to acknowledge the large body of literature on intangible assets and, therefore, produced an inconsistent, incomplete, and potentially very confusing classification of intangible assets.