Addressing Green Intellectual Capital in the Digital Era: A Network Perspective on EU Energy Small Medium Enterprises

Abstract

The Green Intellectual Capital (GIC) is a key competitive factor for European firms and an opportunity for EU sustainable development programs. Yet, existing research has not investigated the GIC of European small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the energy sector. This is surprising given that they represent a pillar for European economies and their transition goals. A reason for this gap might be that SMEs do not usually adopt formal disclosure practices required by traditional GIC measurement methods. This study presents a network-based GIC measurement framework that embeds NLP techniques for analyzing online disclosed information of European SMEs from the energy sector. GIC is subsequently represented as a Knowledge Graph and measured as the extent of firms' knowledge integration. The results confirmed that the proposed GIC measure positively relates to the organizational dimensions of environmental consciousness, innovation capability, and economic performance. These findings open new opportunities for GIC research in digital contexts, thereby enabling investigation of factors fostering SMEs' performances and their contribution to the broader goal of sustainable development.