Intellectual Capital Management in Long-Lasting Family Firms

How to acknowledge, manage and measure intangible strategic resources embedded in organizational settings—such as intellectual capital—has been a widely discussed topic during the last two decades. However, when referring to unique organizational forms such as family-owned or controlled firms, the topic is understudied. Considering that approximately one third of S&P 500 are family-controlled firms— i.e. DuPont—, which have survived beyond a lifetime, the author asks herself how these long-lasting family businesses managed to balance the strategic and parallel creation, development and use of their intellectual capital both at the family and business levels in order to support growth and regeneration. She introduces the ICFB-Family Wealth matrix in order to describe our findings.