Intellectual Capital Management in Long-Lasting Family Firms: The DuPont Case

Intellectual Capital is one of the key-success factors a multinational company has to care about in the new economy. And, although much has been said about how to value, measure and analyze intangible assets, not many authors have focused their efforts in determining how the strategic use of intellectual resources could leverage not only the firm productivity and owners’ reports, but also its people’s creativity, innovation and well-being. This chapter discusses how the strategic administration of these intangible resources could become a sustainable competitive advantage over time, making a company achieve market dominance and a leading position in the industry. We analyze the DuPont Case, a family-controlled business, and examine how the family background provided a set of qualitative resources that impacted (and interacted with) other assets in the organization, creating a unique way of doing and viewing things (e.g. initiatives, values and conduct policies). How long-lasting family firms such as DuPont managed to balance the strategic and parallel creABsTRACT