The Influence of Intellectual Capital Performance on Value Creation in Slovak SMEs

The intellectual capital has been stressed to play a crucial role in determining firm performance in current knowledge economies. Theoretical works as well as several empirical studies have declared its importance as a value creation driver. The aim of our study is to challenge these paradigms in the context of SMEs in Slovakia. Therefore, we examine the relationship between intellectual capital (measured using financial data through VAIC^TM) and firm value creation (using the ROCE measure as the most appropriate value creation proxy in this context). Also, we control for the effect of firm size and leverage in this relation. We based our analysis on 2011 financial statements of 3311 Slovak SMEs operating in ten different industrial sections. The data have been obtained from a business information portal (CRIBIS Universal Register). To examine the relation between intellectual capital and value creation while accounting for industry effects we constructed a set of regression models and analysed the explanatory power of intellectual capital performance in firm value creation. Our results suggest, that intellectual capital performance represents a significant value creation driver in each of the examined industries, and its explanatory power exceeds in all cases but one the explanatory power of control variables. Therefore, our results confirm the paradigm of intellectual capital importance for value creation also in the context of small and medium size companies (SMEs) in Slovakia.