Intellectual capital (IC) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) provide a strong link between the enterprise and stakeholders. These strategic approaches are responsible in value formation for better financial performance. This study investigates the mediating effects of corporate financial performance on the relationship between IC components (ICs) and CSR of firms from the food industry in Asia. We analyzed 308 firm-year observations of 44 listed firms from 2011 to 2017. The results of this study provided mixed findings regarding the effects of ICs and CSR. In addition, results vary from the disaggregated effects of each IC component on environmental, social, and governance pillars. The results also indicate that the combination of accounting and market-based estimates of financial performance was found to be significant mediating factor to explain the phenomenon which varies per ICs and dimensions of CSR. Lastly, the implications for sustainable business practices and investments in knowledge-based resources in the food industry are elaborated.

Entrepreneurship research has been focusing on intangible capitals of an entrepreneur or entrepreneurial teams. Intellectual capital has been a useful framework for researching entrepreneurship, though the inclusion of intangible capital has not been comprehensive enough. We followed and extended this stream to add psychological capital into the discussion of the relationship between intellectual capital and new venture performance. We argue that psychological capital, human capital, and relational capital are representative capitals of entrepreneurs at intra-personal, personal, and interpersonal levels, respectively, none of them can be neglected for new venture success. Based on the analyses of documentary materials of famous entrepreneurs’ interviews from trustable websites/media, this conceptual analyses with case examples found different constructs to serve as important entrepreneurial intellectual capital, which consists of human (i.e., age and education, graduate work experiences, non-graduate work experiences, role models), relational (i.e., trustworthiness and co-founder relations) capitals, and psychological capital (optimism, self-efficacy, hope, and strength). This study contributes by formalizing psychological capital as a theoretical element of intellectual capital and its effectiveness with other forms of intellectual capital on entrepreneurial performance and growth.