Advances in Business Statistics, Methods and Data Collection

5Measuring Investment in Intangible Assets

Mojca Bavdaž¹, Ahmed Bounfour², Josh Martin³, Alberto Nonnis², Giulio Perani⁴, and Tjaša Redek¹

¹School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

²RITM & European Chair on Intangibles, Université Paris‐Saclay, Sceaux, France

³Office for National Statistics, Newport, UK

⁴ISTAT, Rome, Italy

5.1 Introduction

Investment in intangible assets is nowadays recognized as a major source of growth, innovation, and value creation (Corrado et al. 2005; Gu and Lev 2011; Bounfour and Miyagawa 2015; Roth 2020). Over a century ago, Veblen (1908) defined intangible assets as “immaterial items of wealth, immaterial facts owned, valued, and capitalized on an appraisement of the gain to be derived from their possession” (p. 105). The concept developed gradually and appeared in many streams of research. Empirical work by Kendrick, Denison, Jorgenson and others first exposed how a significant share of productivity growth cannot be explained by standard productivity growth elements (tangible capital and labor), but rather with other factors, such as education, skills, R&D, health and know‐how (Ducharme 1998). Research on patents or brands and value creation also underlined the contribution of these assets to value creation (Hall et al. 2005; Sandner and Block 2011). At the firm level, the resource‐based view (Barney 1991; Wernerfelt 1984) and the dynamic capabilities approach (Bounfour 2003; Teece et al. 1997; Teece 2015) underlined ...