How can corporate competence be measured?

Abstract

This paper is about the phenomenon that competence assets never manifest in their whole magnitude and worth. Due to this fact, we do not have complete and fully reliable information about their real magnitude, either in quantity or value. And yet, this may not give an excuse not to look into this matter and not to manage this important and increasingly significant asset in accordance with its - specific - worth! The competence assets of a company consist of two parts: partly the competence synergy made up of the employees´ cooperation, relations, joint successes and failures, and partly that part of the personal competences of employees, by which they generate value for the company. It is expected that from the scope of competence assets, asset items similar to intellectual assets can be removed and then turned into tangible assets (they can be separated from the person who created them) and because they meet the balance sheet criteria, they become appraisable as independent asset items. Such factors can be, for example, the customer value and the customer lifetime value in the case of such servicing companies, where the customers take the commitment for an undefined period of time, but for a longer term anyway to make use of the company´s services on a monthly basis. In such cases customer relations are prioritised as corporate resources having an independent value. In this paper, however, we are focusing on those flow items of the competence assets, which are difficult to alienate from employees.