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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“I cannot define myself as a consultant,” he says. “I’m not doing that. I have done that job. I am a researcher. A researcher is someone who is able to take conceptual frameworks and make a bridge between theory and practice.”
To build that bridge, Bounfour is heavily involved in creating instruments for measuring intellectual capital. He developed the IC-dVAL - Intellectual Capital dynamic Value – which integrates four dimensions and defines metrics for dynamically measuring intellectual capital. It has been applied to the evaluation of assets and performance of different organisations, especially those of knowledge intensive content. Through the calculation of different indexes and assets valuation, it can clarify the relationship between input and output, which is one of the most difficult to tackle for intangibles. It also provides ways of dealing with intangibles management and to measure the impact of research and development programmes on competitiveness.
“If you take intellectual capital, we are not in a vacuum of theories,” he maintains. “There are a lot of theories. The main problem is to make the link between ingredients. For instance, to understand how intellectual capital is important for policy makers, we need to understand how social-economic systems are evolving. Therefore we need to go to anthropology and sociology, make our theoretical shopping list and bring these items into the theories of intellectual capital.”
He’s also involved in various journals, including the ‘Journal of Intellectual Capital’, the ‘Journal of Knowledge Management’, the ‘International Journal of Technology Manament’, the ‘International Journal of Intelligent Enterprise (IJIF)’, ‘Management Decision’, ‘R&D Management’, ‘Revue française de gestion’, and ‘Systèmes D’Information et Management’.
But it is as vice-president for R&D at the New Club of Paris, an association of scientists and “intellect entrepreneurs” dedicated to research and promoting the transformation of societies and economies into ones based on knowledge, that Bounfour’s ideas see their greatest expression.
“More and more value is being created at the frontiers of companies where there are networks of interests,” he says. “We’re no longer dealing with very large vertical organisations. Therefore the questions of communities is very, very important to understanding what happens outside companies.”
For that, a very strong theoretical basis is needed, Bounfour argues, as well as instruments for both organisations and policy-makers to measure the value in these networks. “There are IP issues, HR issues and problems of management: it’s not just a question of putting money into people’s hands and asking them to work together. From that perspective, intellectual capital is very useful.”
Bounfour sees interest in this community-related intellectual capital management around the world. Countries such as Brazil, Morocco, Japan, Finland and Saudi Arabia, as well as Bounfour’s home country of France, are all looking at works to explore this kind of intellectual capital. Although Bounfour regards communities as fundamentally ones based on cities, regions and countries, he also sees even larger communities developing intellectual capital, mainly through the use of information technology. He points to countries such as India and China that have numerous citizens around the world and are looking to take advantage of these supra-national communities.
“People are aware of the importance of the subject,” he says. “But there is still the problem of how to tackle it. In France, there was a report commissioned by the previous Minister of Finance that said that if France builds an intellectual capital strategy, it will increase GDP by 1%. But we shouldn’t just have a naïve instrument for measuring it. What I mean by that was that in the first generation of instruments, we had 100 indexes where you measure investment in IT or whatever. But that doesn’t mean anything – it’s just PR. What we need is to go to one company and say ‘yes, if you build an intellectual capital strategy, then we can leverage something and measure it in a very complete way.’ That’s very reasonable, especially if the company is in an international market.”
Bounfour’s ambitions for the immediate future are typically big: he wants to increase awareness of the subject and “contribute to intellectual dialogues between countries and civilisations.” In particular, he’d like to educate politicians about the need for intellectual capital management.
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