Conceptual Foundations of the Balanced Scorecard
Robert S. Kaplan

Working Paper
10-074

Copyright © 2010 by Robert S. Kaplan Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author.

Conceptual Foundations of the Balanced Scorecard1

Robert S. Kaplan Harvard Business School, Harvard University

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Paper originally prepared for C. Chapman, A. Hopwood, and M. Shields (eds.), Handbook of Management Accounting Research: Volume 3 (Elsevier, 2009).

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Conceptual Foundations of the Balanced Scorecard Abstract
David Norton and I introduced the Balanced Scorecard in a 1992 Harvard Business Review article (Kaplan & Norton, 1992). The article was based on a multi-company research project to study performance measurement in companies whose intangible assets played a central role in value creation (Nolan Norton Institute, 1991). Norton and I believed that if companies were to improve the management of their intangible assets, they had to integrate the measurement of intangible assets into their management systems. After publication of the 1992 HBR article, several companies quickly adopted the Balanced Scorecard giving us deeper and broader insights into its power and potential. During the next 15 years, as it was adopted by thousands of private, public, and nonprofit enterprises around the world, we extended and broadened the concept into a management tool for describing, communicating and implementing strategy. This paper describes the roots and motivation for the original Balanced Scorecard article as well as the subsequent innovations that connected it to a larger management literature.

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“Conceptual Foundations of the Balanced Scorecard”
Robert S. Kaplan

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