The Intellectual Capital Dimensions of Ducati's Turnaround: Exploring Knowledge Assets Grounding a Change Management Program

Abstract

Despite the growing awareness of the importance of researching core strategic resources and capabilities for supporting organisational change, the work that has been done to the date has rarely examined and taken into account the relevance of Intellectual Capital (IC) for the success of a company's strategic turnaround program. Moreover, little attention has been given on what encompasses IC and how it can be conceptualised and interpreted in a change management perspective. Through an extensive review of the literature on IC and along with a case study of the Ducati Motor Holding — one of the leading world brands in the sportive motorcycles manufacturing — this paper aims to bridge this gap first of all by identifying which are the key-knowledge assets involved in a turnaround program, and then focusing on the impact IC has on turnaround actions. Findings highlight important implications both for theory and practice, and reveal interesting relationships that suggest further effort should be placed on the development of a knowledge base-view of company's turnaround and on the analysis of the dynamics that links knowledge assets and successful change management programs.

Success and failure in turnaround attempts. An analysis of SMEs within the Finnish Restructuring of Enterprises Act

“…Rather, multiple, interrelated causes are reported in the literature (Hoffman 1989;Pandit 2000). Table 1 presents a synthesis of the causes of decline identified in 10 studies of turnaround (Schendel, Patton, and Riggs 1976;Bibeault 1982;Slatter 1984;Thain and Goldthorpe 1989a;Grinyer, Mayes, and McKiernan 1990;Gopal 1991;Gething 1997;Arend 2008;Schiuma, Lerro, and Sanitate 2008;Boyne and Meier 2009). Internal causes include management failure, high gearing (high debt relative to equity) and significant one-off causes.…”

Technological discontinuities, outsiders and social capital: a case study from Formula 1

“…These resources comprise both people and knowledge/ information. Hence social capital comprises two key dimensions (Schiuma, et al, 2008), a structural element -knowing the right people (Burt, 2005) and a content element -knowing people with the right knowledge/ information (Adler and Kwon, 2002). The structural element of social capital derives from the way individuals can benefit from having more diverse contacts by virtue of the range of different networks 5 P o s t p r i n t (i.e.…”

Intellectual Capital and Business Performance in Professional Football Clubs: Evidence From a Longitudinal Analysis

“…According to Schiuma, Lerro, and Sanitate (2008), IC has emerged as an "umbrella concept" that has effectively synthesized prior conceptualizations and insights, in an attempt to come up with an operative notion of a company's cognitive and intangible assets. Most well-known and often-cited definitions of IC are as follows: "the sum of everything everybody in your company knows that gives you a competitive edge in your marketplace" (Stewart, 1991, as cited in Sveiby, 1998; "the combined intangible assets of market, intellectual property, human-centered and infrastructure which enable the company to function" (Brooking, 1996, p. 12); "the possession of knowledge, applied experience, organizational technology, customer relationships, and professional skills that provide a company with a competitive edge in the market" (Edvinsson, 1997, p. 368); "the sum of hidden assets of the company not fully captured by the balance sheet and thus include both what is in the heads of organizational members ("human capital") and what is left in the company when they leave ("structural capital")" (G. Roos & J.…”