The knowledge: Ahmed Bounfour
- Article 3 of 3
- IK Magazine, October 2007
Professor Ahmed Bounfour believes that, in the battle for global social advancement, knowledge management is an invaluable weapon.
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People have many reasons for being interested in knowledge management and intellectual capital. For some, it’s an intellectual discipline. Others believe it will make them or their company more profitable and more successful.
Professor Ahmed Bounfour, European Chair on Intellectual Capital Management at the University Paris-Sud, vice president of the New Club of Paris and one of the privileged few to be listed in the French ‘Who’s Who’, thinks the proper use of intellectual capital can change the world.
The co-editor of Intellectual Capital for Communities, Nations, Regions and Cities, Bounfour is interested in how governments and organisations in rich and poor countries can use intellectual capital. He argues that if intangibles and intellectual capital are important to the private sector, they are also important to the productivity and competitiveness of the public sector, and so to communities and nations as a whole. Countries like Japan that have a shrinking demographic can use intellectual capital to remain innovative, while countries in the developing world that have a large number of educated young people need to find new ways to advance their economies. “The knowledge divides within and among countries, on a global scale, is a major issue. Intellectual capital can contribute to defining and prototyping new policy instruments with governments, communities and local authorities.”
Professor Bounfour’s arrival at the field of intellectual capital was by no means a sudden affair. After graduating in economics from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, Bounfour went on to take a PhD in economics and strategic management from the Paris-Dauphine University, which he completed in 1984. For this, he studied the automotive sector. “In the mid-80s, the dominant aspect of industrial economics was very classic at the time – in order to perform, you needed large capacity to perform efficiently, and so on.”
It was an area he was to return to in 1994 when he presented a paper to AIMS (Association Internationale de Management Stratégique), whose 700-odd members come from French-speaking countries including France and Canada. It was in this paper that he laid out some of the scientific aspects of intellectual capital and combining resources in companies, and analysed the impact of emerging management practices such as outsourcing and networking – concepts that are now hot topics.
This paper also marked a return to the world of academia and research. Bounfour had spent the best part of a decade working for private sector organisations such as Euroconsult, where he was director for high tech programmes, which placed him in charge of telecommunications and earth observation projects. Working for high tech industries was “very valuable”, says Bounfour. “It made me more concretely aware of the importance of IT, but made me aware something was missing – the ‘complementary arts’.”
The ‘complementary arts’ include marketing and branding. The problem, according to Bounfour, is how to do these well and uniquely, which is where intangibles such as intellectual capital come into importance. His 1994 paper, which marked out his new research agenda as associate professor for innovation policy and strategic management at the University of Marne-La-Vallée, showed how similar things were important to the automotive industry.
“The automotive industry is now far more intellectually oriented: it’s more about design and marketing,” he says. “Now there are problems with oil consumption and gas emissions, so if you want to sell a car, you need to be good in marketing and design.”
The world of academia is Bounfour’s preferred area of employment. Describing himself as “fundamentally a researcher”, he regards university as a “good space for doing research, liberty, freedom, thinking and working”. Nevertheless, he maintains connections to industries and companies and continues to do research for them. Together with colleagues, he answered a call for tenders from the European Commission, won the bid and helped devise a method for measuring the effect of the single market on intellectual capital. He’s also working with CIOs in France to develop ways to encourage the recognition of information technology by the rest of the business and to help it support their companies’ corporate strategies.
Bounfour is keen to emphasis the need for practicality in everything. “I’m very convinced that good theory is the theory of practice and therefore we need to build all the time a bridge. We need to go to companies and discuss with managers and educate people. Universities need to go in and identify issues and discuss with them how to define concepts and implement them.” Indeed, while “fundamentally a researcher”, he regards that as more than an ivory tower job, with the researcher “in a bubble”: a researcher needs to go out into the field.
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