The incidence of intangible assets in higher education institutions: an analysis in official documents

The intangible assets are important factors of differentiation and potential generators of future benefits for the institutions, therefore they are elements that must be considered by the management of the Institutions of Higher Education. The objective of this study is to determine the degree of importance that Higher Education Institutions devote in the reports of the Evaluation Committees to factors classified as intangible assets. In this article we adopted the Data Based Theory or Grounded Theory to analyze the institutional documents of self-evaluation of Higher Education Institutions, from then on, the collected data were categorized as intangible assets according to the taxonomy proposed by Kayo et al. (2006). It has been found that relationship assets are the most neglected by higher education institutions and that there is a tendency for human assets to receive more attention in reporting. It is observed that Institutions of Higher Education, regardless of academic organization or administrative category, treat intangible assets in the same way, although Public Universities pay more attention to these assets in the Reports of Own Evaluation Commissions, when compared to Private Institutions. Previous research has discussed the importance of intangible assets in Higher Education Institutions, especially human assets. In this article, a new understanding about the management of intangible assets is formulated in Higher Education Institutions, which are the driving forces behind the generation of intangible assets, especially human assets and innovation assets.

Keywords:
Innovation assets; Relationship assets; Human assets; Structural assets; CPA