Kaplan and Xxxxxx’x Strategy Map. Xxxxxx and Xxxxxx (2004) provided a way to analyze the corporate strategy through strategy maps. Figure 1 gives an example of such a map. As the reader can see, the strategy map contains a lot of intangible indicators such as human capital, information capital an organizational capital. These are the foundations of the strategy map and will eventually influence a company’s performance. As stated before, intellectual capital can be divided into four groups: Human Capital, Relational Capital, Structural Capital and Intellectual Property. The impact on the performance of intellectual capital can therefore be seen from four different angles. Xxxxxx and Xxxxxx (2004) divided their Learning and Growth Perspective into 3 different categories: Human Capital, Information Capital and Organizational Capital, the latter includes Structural and Relational Capital. The Balanced Scorecard (a precursor of the strategy map) assumes a cause-and-effect relationship between intangible assets and the performance of an organization among its four perspectives: financial, customers, internal processes, learning and growth (Xxxxxxx, 2006). Xxxxxxx (2006) investigated the importance of trust, participation and strategic relevance to determine their impact on intangible performance. Subsequently he examined the influence of this intangible performance on tangible performance. Figure 2 stipulates the hypotheses tested by Xxxxxxx and the results of the tests. Xxxxxxx (2006) set up a large scaled empirical study on German business networks. The findings of this research showed that there was an interrelation between intangible and tangible performance. Intangible performance in his turn is mainly influenced by strategic relevance and participation. Although most studies showed that trust has a positive effect on a company’s performance, Xxxxxxx’x research did not present such a relationship. The latter was explained by the fact that trust-based organizations have different levels of risk exposure. There did exist an interrelation between trust and participation. As you can see, the first two hypothesizes are not accepted. Xxxxxxx (2006) comments on this that a free-riding-behavior could be an issue preventing partners within the network to trust each other. More research is in this matter definitely needed! Unlike trust, participation does have a strong effect on the intangible performance, but a rather low influence on the tangible performance. Xxxxxxx (2006) argues that this result ...
