Identifying Human Needs in Organizations to Develop Sustainable Intellectual Capital. Reflections on Best Practices

Our modern economy is characterized by a fast-changing and unpredictable business environment in all areas and sectors. Several authors argue that organizations must meet these conditions by developing sustainable intellectual capital (IC). We propose to consider and implement human needs to build up sustainable IC, which is necessary for the organization's long-term success. In the realm of knowledge-based management, we have developed a methodological framework to generate explicit knowledge about human needs in organizations, which we call Bewextra. Combined with the organization's expertise, explicit need knowledge fosters the reinforcement of IC which in turn allows for developing need-based transformation strategies. Over the past few years, we conducted several successful organizational learning processes where we used human needs to develop IC. These projects covered a variety of organizational domains regarding organizational scope, business environments and size. Thus, we gained vast experience and rich empirical data. In this paper, we reflect on factors, which we found to be decisive for organizational learning processes to develop sustainable IC. Accordingly, the research question is the following: Reflecting on case studies from diverse organizational domains and contexts, what are methodological key factors for enabling sustainable IC in need-based organizational learning processes? To answer this question, we employ a multi case study about projects we conducted over the past few years to then discuss methodological key factors to enable sustainable IC.