This paper details an empirical pilot study that explores the development of several conceptual measures and models regarding intellectual capital and its impact on business performance. The objective of this pilot study is to explore the development of items and constructs through principal components analysis and partial least squares (PLS). The final retained, subjective measures and optimal structural specification show a valid, reliable, significant and substantive causal link between dimensions of intellectual capital and business performance. These results should help both academics and practitioners more readily understand the components of intellectual capital and provide insight into developing and increasing it within an organization. Suggestions are then made to advance and improve this research programme

ii Designing the new intranet is about exploiting web technology in an organisational context so that the users can better utilise the intranet from a knowledge management perspective. This means to take advantage of the specific features that characterise web technology, to take advantage of the tangible traces of everyday work activities, and to take advantage of the fact that actions on an intranet are not isolated events. The pervading theme in this thesis is how to design the intranet to activate the users rather than a preoccupation with technology per se. The ambition has been to understand why intranets are being underutilised and to influence the way intranets are understood. Another objective has been to design a new framework for intranet implementations in general and for knowledge creation and knowledge sharing in particular. The research described in this thesis has taken place in an industrial environment and in close collaboration with the members of the organisation under study. The results apply to and are relevant to large and/or geographically disperse organisations, where the members do not know or know of each other and the organisation as a whole does not know what it knows. Further, leveraging the knowledge of the employees becomes increasingly important in the post-industrial society, where organisations depend on networks, co-operation, and openness to achieve a competitive edge. This thesis consists of five papers and a framing introduction. Papers 1, 2, and 3 deal with enacted knowledge and competence, whereas papers 4 and 5 are targeted towards innovation and knowledge creation. The introduction places the papers in a context and presents the contributions; (1) the application prototypes, (2) the papers, and (3) the intranet design framework.

This paper proposes a design theory of how opportunities might be used to facilitate change within a system, particularly an educational system. Opportunity Initiated Systems Design (OISD) is a system design model that retains the values and goals of Idealized Systems Design (ISD) yet incorporates other models of systemic change to form a simpler, more practical theory of systems design. Traditional barriers to ISD are discussed, used as the basis for describing suggest an alternative theory of systems design. The paper articulates the values and goals of OISD and outlines a theory of OISD. The six phases of OISD are presented, including specific guidelines for implementing OISD. Limitations of OISD and implications for further research are discussed. KEY WORDS: systemic change; educational reform; system design; Opportunity Initiated Systems Design.

The theory of international trade suggests that free trade will raise national income. It does not, however, suggest that the incomes of all factors of production will rise. Indeed, Stolper and Samuelson (1941) showed that the removal of import barriers could lower the income of the factor of production used relatively intensively in the production