Analysing the impact of intellectual capital on R&D performance in Italian public universities

During the last few years, the attention of researchers has shifted towards the analysis of Intellectual Capital (IC) in higher education, due to the strong increase in collaborations between university research institutes and companies. This scenario made IC the central element in the evaluation of universities’ research activity performance. Despite a fairly large number of articles on the concept of IC, few empirical studies quantify the link between IC and universities’ research activity performance. Thus, this paper aims to investigate the relationship between IC according to its dimensions and the performance of research activity of universities. To achieve this aim, we develop a theoretical model and test the model using secondary data from all the Italian public universities through the Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) method. The findings of this study highlight IC components with the greatest impact on R&D activities.