Intellectual capital and value creation beyond service delivery: A case study

The public sector is a primary example of how intellectual capital transcends the scope of a single organisation, even though the relationship between value creation and intellectual capital ecosystems of ten remains a relatively unexplored process within public administration (Guthrie, Ricceri and Dumay, 2012;Dumay, Guthrie and Puntillo, 2015; Guthrie and Dumay, 2015). The contributions of intellectual capital to value creation beyond individual public companies into wider society, as described in the fourth stage of intellectual capital research (Dumay and Garanina, 2013;Guthrie et al., 2017), has been little investigated (Borin and Donato, 2015;Secundo et al., 2018). This paper focuses on the case study of a regional agency in Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy, which is not only responsible for assistance, regulation and service delivery, but also for engaging its stakeholders and the public at large to disseminate knowledge to promote values and appropriate behaviour in the policy areas it is responsible for. The research looks at the role played by intellectual capital in the agency's value creation strategies and how the agency's structure and processes influence intellectual capital and its management in an effort to create value for the agency's ecosystem. The research not only validates the existence of ecosystem frameworks in public administration and the key role played by intellectual capital in their design, creation and implementation, but it also highlights the need in the public sector for a defined role for intellectual capital and collective intelligence in governance models. In particular, findings underline the need for new intellectual capital management systems based on a collective intelligence approach within multi-stakeholder and co-creation frameworks in a public service ecosystem logic, reflecting the public sector's evolving role. © 2019 Academic Conferences Limited. All rights reserved.