Audit of Intellectual Capital at an Industrial Enterprise: Open Data Analysis Digital-Model

Intellectual capital determines the strategic competitiveness of enterprises in any industry, but there are still no universal approaches to managing intellectual development in the corporate environment. The functioning of the industrial complex is associated with the active use of intellectual resources. This article discusses the assessment of the intellectual capabilities of enterprises based on audit and digital transformation. The article aims to create a model for auditing the intellectual capital at the industrial enterprise focusing on digital analysis of data from open sources. The object of the article is the intellectual capital of industrial enterprises. Within the framework of the study, a mechanism for evaluating individual components of intellectual capital was developed, taking into account their significance for industrial enterprises. Audit activities will make it possible to identify problem areas and improve the efficiency of managing specific knowledge and resources. The study is based on the digital analysis of corporate enterprise reporting for auditing. The authors believe those audit activities will facilitate the formation of new approaches to identifying bottlenecks in the field of industrial intellectualization. The research resulted in the determination of a number of coefficients, on which it is proposed to build an integral assessment of the intellectual capital of an enterprise and develop recommendations for resolving problems to ensure the intellectual growth of an enterprise.

Audit activities; Industrial production; Innovative development; Intellectual capital; Intellectualization

      At the same time, the assessment of the knowledge structure is a complicated process since there are some implicit factors that are difficult to take into account in the innovation policy of enterprises (Edler & Fagerberg, 2017). Objective trends in various segments of the national economy raise the question of the need to develop methods for assessing IC. Despite the importance of intellectual resources, there are still no universal approaches to managing intellectual development (de Pablos, 2020). Thus, the scientific problem lies in the lack of methods for assessing IC.

The object of the study is the IC of industrial enterprises. It is advisable to focus on industrial enterprises, as they act as drivers of economic growth. In this context, the justification of the efficiency of industrial production is of interest, which is largely due to the use of intellectual resources that contribute to increasing the intensity of production.

It is proposed to use a methodological apparatus to determine the indicators for calculating IC based on a digital analysis of corporate reporting available in the public domain. These methods include auditing. The study also uses the method of intellectual capital assessment and the method of coefficients. The authors of this study propose to expand the apparatus for managing the intellectual capabilities of the company using the technologies of auditing. The purpose of the study is to consider the possibilities of conducting an IC audit, focusing on the features of industrial production. To achieve this purpose, a system for evaluating individual elements of IC, with an emphasis on their importance for industrial enterprises, was devised.

Conflicts in the business environment have a negative impact on its development. The contradictions between owners and managers affect the enterprise management system, pushing the vector of its development away from intellectual trajectories (Shadova et al., 2016). Unfortunately, this practice is common in business, and certain efforts are required to identify negative trends. In particular, the IC audit technology using digital tools makes it possible to identify many problem areas.

Audit services today are becoming increasingly popular, which affects many industries. A smart audit can provide information on assessing the potential benefits of acquiring intellectual property rights (Nikzad, 2015). Based on the assessment of intellectual resources, economic entities are able to develop effective strategies to increase the level of innovation with an acceptable complication of their intellectual development system.

The analysis of reporting documents reveals the relationship between intellectual property and the competitive advantages of a business. The strongest correlation is observed in high-tech industries, for example, in the field of IT (Roy, 2013). At the same time, in high-tech companies, it is much easier to analyze explicit and implicit knowledge and develop recommendations for enhancing the most significant factors in creating intellectual efficiency (Zheng et al., 2009).

The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the transformation of economic and social processes, ensuring the ongoing promotion of digitalization in all areas of business and the acceleration of intellectual growth in the business environment. Enterprises generate information resources, contributing to the development of new tools for auditing intellectual elements (Rodionov et al., 2021). The acquisition of knowledge can be considered like an asset and a potential component of the efficiency of an enterprise and its competitive advantages. In production and economic activities, a strategic potential is formed on the basis of the intellectual factor, the effective management of which has already become a generally recognized factor in improving the financial performance of business entities (Santos-Rodrigues et al., 2012).

Industrial enterprises are developing their innovative activity and determining the coefficients to assess the effectiveness of development, taking into account their technological support. The availability of adequate economic and mathematical methods makes it possible to identify areas of development and growth in the innovation environment, and IC plays a significant role in achieving strategic innovation objectives. This practice is typical for many important industries, such as engineering and metallurgy (Savchenkov et al., 2020). For some industries, knowledge resource is an important element in modernizing production capabilities and in finding ways to optimize value-creation processes. The studies confirm that modernization is constrained not only by innovative factors but also by investment factors. For example, agriculture is forced to find ways of technical modernization, but it does not have sufficient potential to build an intellectual development strategy (Kiritsa et al., 2021; Chahal et al., 2020). The result of these problems is the intellectual inefficiency of this industrial sector.

The sector intellectual inefficiency is determined by the authors of the study as a set of problems related to intellectual development that is characteristic of a particular sector of the national economy. These problems are most obvious in the industry, represented by many sectors and manufacturing enterprises, which makes it possible to prepare a sufficient array of data to study problem areas and build high-quality digital models.

Sector intellectual inefficiency can seriously distort data when calculating quantitative and qualitative indicators in IC assessment; however, when comparing enterprises in one sector, it becomes possible to identify average sector values (it is recommended to take the median value) and develop relative models to identify problematic characteristics. IC audit in this context makes it possible to calculate all the necessary coefficients to compare enterprises, ignoring sector-specific information gaps that prevent obtaining an objective picture. Digital models based on the proposed algorithms allow for accelerated calculations of the values that were selected in the indicators according to the developed methodological framework (Zaytsev et al., 2020b; Burova et al., 2018).

Achieving the success of an industrial complex in a competitive business environment is impossible without IC. This statement is supported by many studies. The article of Sarlija and Stani (2017) examined the relationship between IC and enterprise’s sustainable growth. A positive dependence of enterprise growth on human and organizational capital was revealed. The article of Bril et al. (2018) highlighted the complication of the mechanisms for the formation of financial and economic indicators through the use of intellectual factors.

These conditions determine the improvement of the methodology of financial and economic assessments, focusing on the new structures of innovation risk. Researchers confirm that for the sustainable development of an industrial enterprise, it is necessary to take into account not only financial and production aspects but also to form a basis for managing human resources, including their intellectual derivatives, which are the basic element for increasing labor productivity.

A variety of approaches to determining the essential structure of IC creates a solid ground for the development of a set of measures aimed at facilitating the intellectualization of labor and diversification of mental activities