Human capital and knowledge audit as the competitive advantage of companies

Abstract

The quality of available human resources is one of the key factors for economic development. Companies could increase their competitiveness by converting knowledge held by individuals into services and products. Knowledge of humans is an innovative resource of the corporate, which could be hardly followed by the concurrent. It has become a widely established fact that humans are unique resources of corporate, which both physical and intellectual way could create values, and his experience, skills and capabilities has crucial impact on company’s success. Knowledge audit should be the first step in any Knowledge Management initiative. The goal is to develop action plans to facilitate the flow as well as stock of knowledge within an organization, to improve the efficiency of the use of external knowledge elements. Corporate intellectual resources can become real competitive edge only if management recognizes the importance of personal experiences, which impacts positively the present and the future: beyond the profit, they create additional intellectual and personal values. Knowledge audits could point out possible weak points, which -after correction- could increase the intellectual assets.

Keywords: Human capital, core processes, knowledge audit, knowledge map and flow, intellectual and human value.