According to Bernard Marr (2005), the origin of the term IC dates back to 1836, when
the scholar Nassau William Senior (1836) pointed out the IC as an important
productivity factor. In the late 1950s, Peter Drucker (1959) stigmatized the importance
of knowledge as a resource of organizations, and Penrose (1959), in her important work
The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, pointed to the business organizations as a
“collection of resources, divided into physical assets and human capital, in turn, formed
by skills and know-how, all tied together by an administrative framework”.