The Research Of Intellectual Capital And Competitive Advantage

In an era of knowledge-based economy, intangible assets have replaced tangible assets as the core competence. In this way, intellectual capital has become a key factor in corporate’s long-term profitability and sustained competitive advantage attainment. To Chinese enterprises, it is an austere problem to create, manage and utilize the intellectual capital, adapt to the changes, and maintain the competitive advantage, when facing the uncertainty and complexity of the environment.Despite the importance of intellectual capital and adaptive capacity to the enterprises, the study of how these two variables influence each other and furthermore act on competitive advantage is still comparatively rare. The study was empirical and combined qualitative and quantitative research. The relevant studies about intellectual capital, adaptive capacity and their relationships with competitive advantage were carried to overall review. Based on these theory bases,"adaptive capacity"-the mediating variable, was brought into the relationship between the intellectual capital and competitive capacity, and the concept model of the three was put forward. And the theory assumptions and investigation design among all concepts were established. The factor analysis method (. FAM), descriptive statistical analysis and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) were adopted to analyze the relationship among intellectual capital, adaptive capacity and competitive advantage in an empirical way, identify the direct effect between intellectual capital and competitive capacity and the indirect effect via adaptive capacity, as well as the interactions of the intellectual capital components.179questionnaires have been sent to sample enterprises and150of them were valid, and the valid response rate is calculated as83.8%. After quantitative analysis and theoretical exploration, the main results and conclusions are as follows:(1)The classification of intellectual-human capital, structural capital, and relational capital is reasonable. And the indexes set to evaluate the intellectual capital have a good validity and reasonability.(2) The definition of adaptive capacity and the indexes to measure it is practicable.(3) The components of intellectual capital-human capital, structural capital, and relational capital-not only have direct effect to competitive advantage, but also have indirect effect via the mediatory role of adaptive capacity.(4) Adaptive capacity has a significant and direct positive impact on competitive advantage.(5) There are significant interactions between the three intellectual capital components.The theory innovations of this study are as follows:Firstly, introduce the adaptive capacity into the research of intellectual capital and competitive advantage and prove its mediating effect. Secondly, enrich quantitative research indexes set of enterprise Intellectual capital. Thirdly, based on the findings of interaction of intellectual components, put forward practical suggestions to improve intellectual capital management.