New conditions and requirements for business operation in the modern economic environment are determined by vectors like digitalization, social responsibility, ecology, sustainable development. Apart from traditional factors, business owners have to put more emphasis on intangible assets as factors increasing the value of business assets. New kinds of resources with importance for owner and investor are admittedly intellectual ones, including competencies of staff, intellectual property objects, new technologies, etc. The elaboration of a conceptual framework for intellectual capital building in business enterprises in the innovation-driven economy context, involving scientifically grounded approaches to the structuring of intellectual capital, is, therefore, an issue of vital importance. The article’s objective is to sum up approaches to interpreting and structuring the economic category “intellectual capital”, with elaborating the method for intellectual capital formation in the business enterprise. The economic nature of intellectual capital in the business enterprise is outlined by highlighting criteria of its recognition and key forms of its manifestations in the business enterprise through establishing the logic of their interaction. The characteristics of intellectual capital were classified from economic and management perspectives, with interpreting it as a business asset, a business resource and a business cost. The structuring of intellectual capital allowed to highlight its core economic features: tangibility and intangibility. A structural model of intellectual capital in the business enterprise, built on seven components representing criteria of its recognition, is proposed. The procedure of intellectual capital formation by the potential options of its import and generation is analyzed.  It is concluded that growth in all the components of intellectual capital is supposed to have a positive effect for the financial indicators of a reporting period, as each of its components will be recognized as an economic category once it is capable to generate a result or a value in a short or long term.