Disclosure on Intellectual Capital in the -age of Industry 4.0

Matter of interest is the disclosure on intellectual capital (IC) in the era of global “knowledge economy” or global “knowledge society”. The aim of the paper is to verify the level of disclosure that Italian companies have on the components and on the relevance of their IC. Using the “content analysis” and a specific method already tested in managerial literature, we propose a report that measures the intellectual capital with the adoption of 21 functional indicators, which consider specific aspects of intangible assets of a firm. Applying the content analysis to financial statements of 56 companies included in five super-sector stock indexes of Italian equity market, we find that the level of overall disclosure is, on average, moderate but increasing. Observing a disclosure index based on the specific components of intellectual capital considered in this research, all the aspects of IC have benefited, on average, of an improvement in the level of external communication. This paper represents an improvement of a paper presented at the Symorg Conference regarding the empirical analysis. At the same time, it is just the first step of a wider research that aims to verify the relationships existing between IC, firm performances, and market capitalization.