Assessing the link between Intellectual Capital Formation and Performance of a University

The resource-based view (RB V) of the firm grew out of frustration with the structure- conduct-performance paradigm of the industrial organization (IO) view of the firm and the early RBV theorists found the IO view - that a firm s success was wholly determined by its external environment - to be unrealistically limited and constraining. This paper is an attempt to apply the RB V of the firm to university settings and it looks at the process of Intellectual Capital (IC) formation of a university as the basis for its performance. The paper deals with the issues of IC formation, its measurement, definition of a university s performance, its measurement and the association between the two. The paper provides an overview of the various RB V theories along with a detailed discussion on the notions of strategy, resources, capabilities, competencies and creation of competitive advantage of a firm with special emphasis on the role of human capital in sustaining this competitive advantage. While applying the RBV in Education industry, the four schools of University of Management & Technology> (UMT) Lahore are studied in the light of RBV. The paper also highlights the limitations of the current study along with some of the future research implications for the human capital-RBV link.