2-3 minds are definitely better than one.

And so we came up with our thesis topic while waiting to meet with Leif. We bounced it off him, and he loved it.

Thesis topic: How do IC elements impact / influence different innovation systems? What is the relationship between IC elements and innovation systems, if any?

We'll be looking at the interplay between IC elements (human, process, market and renewal capital) and different innovation systems as categorised by Kao, using 3 countries as case studies - Singapore, Malaysia, Finland. Obviously, given Alliz and my origins, this has particular personal meaning to us.

Our hypothesis at present is that, while the various IC elements may have influenced the (conscious or unconscious) adoption of a certain innovation system, that innovation system, over time, also serves to influence the development of the individual IC elements (albeit at different levels), and as the proportion and magnitude of IC elements change, so perhaps does the country's innovation system. Think of it as a virtuous cycle of sorts, or a harmony between elements, system and resources that causes a country to either grow in IC, or falter due to imbalance.

Our choice of topic was actually rather heavily influenced by 2 articles Alliz and I came across during our Strategic Management course in Autumn 2009 -

• Lin, C. & Edvinsson, L. (2008): National intellectual capital: Comparison of the Nordic countries.
• Kao, J. (2009): Tapping the world's innovation hotspots.

So, while one of the authors for the first article is our thesis supervisor, we may be having an interview with the author of the second article sometime later, to tap his brain and insights into the world of IC. Exciting!

Leif has gotten us started with a rather long list of resources (primary of which is from Ms Carol Lin, who Leif will put us in touch with), and we hope to be able to start looking at the data, while thinking about the methodology. approach and structure to the report.

It is nice though, to now have a better (more focused) idea of what we are researching and writing on.

For now - Happy Friday!

Decisions, decisions.

Tomorrow, we are going to meet Leif to discuss and finetune the thesis topic. The world of intellectual capital (IC) is a fascinating one. It is still a relatively new area of research, and I have a strange feeling that not many (including ourselves) know how exactly to handle this new wave and source of competitive advantage in countries and companies, even as it becomes increasingly important.

However, we only have 10 weeks to accomplish a work that will hopefully make some sort of contribution to the research world, and we have to be focused.

At present, we have a couple of ideas that we're interested in, though each presents unique challenges as well:

• Apply an IC evaluation method that Leif had used in a previous paper in investigating Nordic countries, to instead investigate Asian countries like Singapore and Malaysia, or compare regions such as Singapore-Malaysia and Öresund
• Employing time lag analysis to test causal relationships between the four types of capital (human capital, market capital, process capital, renewal capital) and financial capital --> my personal favourite, but we also recognise the challenge here in doing something that has not been done before, i.e. coming up with a new method to apply on new data

Other thoughts include:

• Can there be a global / regional standard for IC? (ala Corporate Governance)
• Can a Singaporean excel in Sweden, and vice versa? Or is IC and importance of certain variables country/culture-specific?
• How is an IC culture actually developed? What is the timespan of national IC development? What are the conditions that need to be present for IC to be developed successfully?

It all feels so up in the air at the moment, and I think one of our key concerns is in how to find the appropriate data. Because IC is still such a subjective field, we wonder about whether we can obtain data of sufficient integrity which require minimal guessimations, though that may not be possible.

We're hoping that tomorrow will bring more light, to guide us to make the right (or at least an informed) decision on what we should embark on.

And so our journey begins.

I wonder where we'll end up this June?

Timeline

March 15 : Submission of Thesis Proposal

April 20 : Registration Deadline for Midterm Seminars

April 26-27 : Midterm Seminars (defending our draft)

May 24 : Registration Deadline for Final Seminars

May 29 : Submission of Final Thesis via Email / Uploading (Hardcopy Submission on May 31)

June 7 : Final Seminars (defending our complete master thesis)