At present, knowledge plays a key role in the new economy. Nevertheless, its measurement as intellectual capital has not been possible from a certainty vision for the states, events, and entities, leaving aside the complexity of organizations. This chapter proposes a paradigmatic shift where the fundamental support is the relational-semiotic condition of human organizations; any deviation from its strategic goals could be explained through the closeness between language and the action emerging from language. Defined as coherence and congruity (sustainability) management, the process named NEUS allows increasing both coherence and congruity through co-participating in decisional modeling, and transferring repulsion interactions to organization areas that re-signify the conflict. Configurations arising from viability are Production Cognitive Value.
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In an economy of tangibles, the language of objects, or nominalization, has been called upon to deal with intangible world demands. If, however, we define organization as a relational system, composed of relational processes and organized semiotically from the culture, which is evoked to legitimize this task, then knowledge production can be seen as the result of structuring codes that generate intentionality to accomplish a determined product/service process and additionally partnering relationships and experiences.
In the same vein, we can affirm that a concept such as intellectual capital makes no sense if it is limited to the heaping up of ideas. So, it makes more sense to talk about productive cognitive capital than intellectual capital. Productive cognitive capital could be defined as a system of codes (semiosis) intentionally aimed at the production of goods and services. An initial difference between the two is that productive cognitive capital is sharper, focused on processes. Naturally, since any system of code needs to be interpreted, this process generates uncertainty because there is a gap between the intention of the code and the associated action: a smaller gap means less uncertainty.
Productive cognitive capital falls within the scope of business intelligence since it facilitates decision-making through the understanding of how things function at present and the anticipation of action, thus generating a consistent direction when dealing with complex scenarios. This definition makes it possible to assess semiotic structure effectiveness within the production process through proximity evaluation, known as coherence. This involves a paradigm shift in business focus and the role of R&I (Research and Innovation), which would impact directly the associated development of strategies. For this reason, design efforts associated to R&I should be driven from the relationship between these strategies in order to shape the knowledge associated with their development. This would provide a better explanation of value in use and exchange value in the scope of the new economy. Productive cognitive capital should be viewed as the knowledge ‒or configuration‒ process associated to both values, a feature unique to the relational process. This implies that an increase in productive cognitive capital exists in strict proportion to the relational quality of the network that produces it; in other words, a rapprochement between the argumentative line and the associated degree of action (coherence).
A desirable outcome of this development will be an increase in network coherence and, therefore, in productive cognitive capital, reflected as company value. In this new scope, knowledge generation is a natural process aligned with the organization’s “emotional state”, supported by three cornerstones: cognition, semiotics and interactivity.
The present chapter aims to find alternatives, both theoretical and methodological, to evaluate productive cognitive capital.
Knowledge society and knowledge economy are concepts coined in the 20th century to highlight the role of knowledge as a key and differentiating element of economic growth. Hence, intellectual capital, defined in the simplest possible terms as knowledge that generates value, has become the subject of study in many research works (Petty & Guthrie 2000). However, there exist as many definitions of intellectual capital as there are researchers devoted to the study of this matter.