Research group has finished the work

Project "The Changing role of intellectual resources over the economic crisis"

This research investigates corporate success factors over the crisis period. This issue appears to be of a particular importance of the empirical corporate finance in recent years. During crisis periods companies often prefer to find ways to decrease their expenses. For that reason many companies in 2008-2009 cut their staff in non-operational departments, including marketing and HR departments, reduced investments in research and development, and decreased salaries and training costs. Most of the mentioned investments are related to intangibles. Nevertheless, cost reduction allowed these companies to survive for a while in difficult economic conditions. Meanwhile these measures deprived the companies of many of their strategic competitive advantages.

As a result, a number of companies which chose the restrictive investment policy failed during and after the crisis.

However, some of businesses decided to take a risk over this period by increasing their investments in order to benefit from the market turbulence. Many of them failed as well, but those companies that won present extraordinary results today. The low rate of prosperous strategies related to marketing, HR and R&D in the 2008-2009 period can be explained by the lack of available information about the potential effectiveness of their investments over the crisis. We suppose that if companies are more aware of the beneficial effects of a good strategy of knowledge management during market instability, a number of substantial problems could be avoided.

This is the reason why we chose to investigate companies’ key success factors related to intangible resources management over the crisis.

We seek to advocate the idea that investments in intangibles allow a company to be better off, even if the markets go down.