Supporting intellectual capital with the physical work environment

Lots of organisational aspects have been identified that can stimulate the sharing of human capital. This paper takes a different viewpoint, and investigates the aspects of the physical work environment that stimulate both this process (called socialisation) as the transformation of human capital into organisational capital (externalisation). An extensive content analysis has been made of literature from very different research areas. The 8 identified real estate aspects are then related to cooperative behaviour and activities that bring about the sharing of both explicit and tacit knowledge. The influencing mechanism turned out to distinguish between aspects that stimulate interaction and aspect that really provide a (tacit) knowledge-sharing environment. These are translated into managerial implications and the identification of many more lacunas.