The Impact of Intellectual Capital on Enterprise Performance in Saudi Arabia: Literature Review of Empirical Research

Abstract

Physical assets such as buildings, plants, and so on, are important factors in the production era, but their importance has decreased with increased the importance of intangible assets in the knowledge era. In the knowledge-based economy, intellectual capital (IC) is one of the most important assets in an enterprise for achieving sustainable competitive advantages. As a result, research on the correlation between IC and enterprise performance (EP) and its role in achieving competitive advantage has become one of the most controversial topics in accounting globally. The findings of the empirical research have been inconsistent; there is no consensus on the effect of IC on the enterprise's performance due to the different definitions and methods of measuring IC used among researchers. The paper focuses on reviewing empirical research about the effect of IC on EP in Saudi Arabia, aiming at a presentation of recent developments and a discussion of the direction for future research. This paper is the first study to review empirical research on IC and EP in the Saudi context.