The Practice of Entrepreneurial Excellence: An Overview of Methodologies for Achieving Excellence in the Knowledge Economy Context

According with the foundations of strategic management literature, excellence in organizations has always been mainly due to good strategy formulation (business formula) and excellent strategy implementation (business recipe). In the Knowledge Economy context this fundamental statement is still valid. Nevertheless, in this context, building excellent business formulas and first class business recipes require the contribution of intangibles as the key building blocks for gaining and sustaining competitive advantages. So, intangibles become the key ingredient to manage businesses in order to achieve entrepreneurial excellence. During the last decades many authors have written about the failure of traditional accounting systems to assist managers with the management of their organizations. The recognition of relevance of knowledge in the process of value creation has given rise to a variety of different approaches to the firm’s management. The literature refers to several models based on the concept of Excellence, such as those of The European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) and the Malcolm Baldridge Award, both associated to the Total Quality Management (TQM) movement. These models have been largely used by organizations across the world to help them to improve their performance. However, to offer fair comparison and a system of benchmarking to companies, these models must be applied consistently in their structure, criteria, approach and context. Non strategy focused models are useful for improving and upgrading the existent business models but they are not adequate for guiding innovation and radical transformations required in a global and hypercompetitive environment. On the contrary, intellectual capital models because their strategic nature, are more suitable for guiding business models in face of the knowledge economy challenges. It is also recognized that the excellence approach requires a fundamentally different managerial model compared to earlier quality approaches. This paper is theoretical in nature and aims to provide readers with an overview of the existent models for achieving excellence. Thus, the purpose of this study is to present and discuss/reflect on some well-known excellence frameworks or models in order to understand the development of the entrepreneurial excellence concept in the last years, to understand the limitations of non strategy focused models, and discuss how intellectual capital models can provide a holistic approach on the strategic process since formulation till accreditation of intangibles.