Using Fuzzy AHP to manage Intellectual Capital assets: an application to the ICT service industry

In today’s competitive business environment, Intellectual Capital (IC) management is ever more recognized as a fundamental factor in gaining competitive advantage. Actually, most firms have only a vague idea of how to manage investments in IC and what they should obtain from these investments. As a result, many companies overlook to balance IC investments, overinvesting in some IC components and neglecting other ones. Following this lead, the aim of the paper is to assess the relative importance of IC components, with respect to their contribution to the company value creation, in order to obtain guidelines for IC management and investments. We propose a model for IC evaluation by integrating Fuzzy Logic and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). This Fuzzy AHP approach allows to capture and foster IC dynamics: experts and managers are greatly supported by the use of linguistic variables in the evaluation process of the company intangible assets. Finally, the application of the Fuzzy AHP methodology to a group of ICT service companies is presented.