THE INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL DIMENSIONS OF DUCATI'S TURNAROUND: EXPLORING KNOWLEDGE ASSETS GROUNDING A CHANGEMANAGEMENT PROGRAM

Despite the growing awareness of the importance of researching core strategic resources and capabilities for supporting organisational change, the work that has been done to the date has rarely examined and taken into account the relevance of Intellectual Capital (IC) for the success of a company's strategic turnaround program. Moreover, little attention has been given on what encompasses IC and how it can be conceptualised and interpreted in a change management perspective. Through an extensive review of the literature on IC and along with a case study of the Ducati Motor Holding - one of the leading world brands in the sportive motorcycles manufacturing-this paper aims to bridge this gap first of all by identifying which are the key-knowledge assets involved in a turnaround program, and then focusing on the impact IC has on turnaround actions. Findings highlight important implications both for theory and practice, and reveal interesting relationships that suggest further effort should be placed on the development of a knowledge base-view of company's turnaround and on the analysis of the dynamics that links knowledge assets and successful change management programs.