MERITUM: MANAGEMENT CONTROL STUDY, FINLAND

Competence is one of the most important production factors in today's economy. At the same time, empirical research displays indicate a rapidly growing market-to-book ratio, especially for knowledge intensive firms. This, in turn, is claimed to result from the expanding intangible knowledge base of these firms. Intangibles have value on the market, but they do not show up in traditional financial accounts. MERITUM, a EU-financed multi-country research project, which started in November 1998, aims at producing a set of guidelines to measure and disclose intangibles in order to improve the decision making process of managers and stakeholders. The project is divided into four parts: (1) produce a classification of intangibles, (2) analyse management control systems at a firm level, (3) assess the relevance of intangibles in the capital markets, and (4) produce and test a set of guidelines for the measurement and disclosure of intangibles. The project participants include researchers and organisations from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, and Spain. Finnish partners are The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy and Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration in Helsinki. The objectives of the Management Control Study (activity (2) in MERITUM) is to analyse management and control systems at the firm level and to reveal European best practices in: - measuring investments in intangibles and appraising the outcome from those investments, - using those outcomes for management decision making, and - disclosing information on intangibles for the use of stakeholders.