Swedish Companies

Skandia is the prime example of a Swedish company that reports annually on its IC. In addition, there are a number of companies that employ Sveiby's Intangible Asset Monitor to report on their IC annually. A prominent example is Celemi, which started reporting on its IC in 1995.

Danish IC Statements

The Danish Ministry of Trade and Industry, in cooperation with 17 Danish companies, issued guidelines for IC statements (ICSs) to encourage companies to report on their IC. The ICS com­prises the following parts:

1.      The knowledge narrative. Describes how the company has organized its knowledge resources to meet the needs of its customers. This includes the company's vision, mis­sion, and value proposition.

2.      Management challenges. Derived from the knowledge narrative, and describes the chal­lenges that management faces in developing knowledge resources in connection with customers, employees, processes, and technologies.

3.      The reporting part. Describes the initiatives and actions taken to address management challenges, and reports on their progress through figures, indicators and charts. Four areas should be covered:

•   Actions that are important from a customer perspective

•   Actions vis-a-vis employees

•   Processes that are crucial to the defined actions

•   Technologies that are important to the defined actions

Though the indicators used in the samples provided in the guideline are very similar to those developed by Skandia and Celemi, two models for reporting are provided. Model A reports on customers, employees, processes, and technologies of the organization as a whole with indicators to reflect their strength, renewal, and growth. Model B uses indicators that show progress under each of the defined action areas (addressing a certain management challenge), and provides indi­cators across customers, employees, processes, and technologies focuses.