Investigating the Impact of Intellectual Capital on Competitive Advantage Moderating the Quality and Speed of Innovation, and Business Intelligence

Objective: Competitive advantage is defined as a distinct skill, technology or resource that enables the organization to provide a service, commodity or benefits distinct from what competitors provide within the same sector, which confirms the distinction and difference of the organization from its competitorsfrom the point of view of customers. Intellectual capital emerged as a term in the past decades. It is the talent, skills, technical knowledge, relationships, and machines, which can be converted into value. It is the sum of all that known by all individuals in the organization and achieves a competitive advantage in the market. intellectual capital is divided into structural capital, which is represented in systems, patents and databases; human capital, which is represented in education, training, experience; relational capital, which is represented in contracts, loyalty, and the brand. Innovation speed is defined as the pace of progress that a firm displays in innovating and commercializing new products.In fact, It describes a firm’s capability to accelerate the activities and tasks that occur through the new product development process. Innovation quality is defined as the summation of evaluation on customers’ satisfaction and firm’s innovativeness. In light of a competitive economy and the information age, intellectual capital has become the real capital of organizations, which is considered the main role of innovation. It is the leader in the process of change, and therefore is able to transform knowledge into value and then into a competitive advantage, which means that the center of gravity in value generation has moved from the exploitation of natural (physical) resources to the exploitation of tangible and intellectual assets, and from the law of diminishing returns (applicable to material goods) to the law of increasing returns (regarding knowledge and ideas). Therefore, intellectual capital is becoming one of the prominent features in the current era, the era of the knowledge revolution and the revolution of smart technology. In fact, data, technology, intellectual capital and business intelligence tools are the components that without which the use of information in the decision-making process would be impossible. On the other hand, the use of such data requires certain knowledge and skills that are embedded in intellectual capital. Business Intelligence is the process of providing insights that will enable business managers to make tactical decisions and is considered as a method of converting data into information and subsequently to knowledge. However, many scholars have considered the relationship between intellectual capital and competitive advantage to be impacted by the mediation of some factors such as business intelligence system, innovation speed and innovation qualit . Therefore, the aim of the study was to investigate the moderating effect of business intelligence, speed and quality of innovation on the relationship between intellectual capital and competitive advantage of companies.

Method: The current research is practical in terms of its purpose and descriptive-survey in terms of data collection. The statistical population includes all knowledge-based and technological companies in Isfahan Scientific & Research Town. Data collection tool, a questionnaire was distributed online and 420 questionnaires were collected, and with only 390 cases that are valid for analysis due to data screening that included missing data,were finalized for analysis. SEM (CB-SEM) and CFA methods, respectively, to determine structural equation modeling confirmatory factor analysis using SPSS and AMOS software; And Process software was used to path analysis to estimate the different indirect effects, and finally bootstrapping method was used for moderate effects.

Results: The results showed: The effect of structural, relational and human capital on competitive advantage; A) with the moderation of business intelligence respectively, insignificant, negatively significant and positively significant. b) with the moderating of innovation quality respectively, positively significant, negatively insignificant and negatively insignificant negative. and c) with the moderation of novation speed will be positively, significant and negatively significant respectively. In fact, The findings prove the existence of the mediating effect of innovation speed it is clearly shown in the positive impact of human and relational capital on competitive advantage. However, results emphasize that human capital and relational capital appear to play a good role in facilitating competitive advantage and this is probably due to the relationship-oriented culture in the business environment, which highly emphasizes interpersonal harmony and social relations. This means that companies are effectively taking advantage of innovation speed by wich human capital and Sustainability relational capital improve competitive advantage. In addition, the business intelligence, innovation speed and quality respond differently to human, structural and relational capital, and give different results and impact on competitive advantage. However, the only explanation of the absence of the mentioned mediation effect (if there should be) is the low level of the related components of the intellectual capital.

Conclusion: Finally high levels of human, relational and structural capital help and accelerate the effect of business intelligence, innovation speed and quality on competitive advantage in their mediation process in companies. Management should strive to continuously develop and maintain their intellectual capital, through investments in staff recruitment and selection, staff training and development, process design and improvement, and more. They must allocate more resources to certain components, in proportion to the competitive advantage they aspire to. It should also be noted that different components of intellectual capital may achieve different goals,which must be taken into consideration and which require an understanding of the components of intellectual capital and how they work. In sum, these findings reveal the underlying mechanisms through which intellectual components lead to improved competitive advantage through the mediating mechanism of business intelligence, innovation speed and innovation quality, Because the findings provide evidence that all mediators serve differently as important mediating mechanisms between the different components of intellectual capital and competitive advantage.