The Balance Score Card (BSC) retains financial metrics as the ultimate outcome measures for company success, but supplements these with metrics from three additional perspectives – customer, internal process, and learning and growth – that we proposed as the drivers for creating long-term shareholder value.

The Balanced Scorecard was originally developed by Dr. Robert Kaplan of Harvard University and Dr. David Norton as a framework for measuring organizational performance using a more balanced set of performance measures. Traditionally companies used only short-term financial performance as the measure of success. The balanced scorecard is anchored on four perspectives, which include financial, business process, customer, and organizational capacity. The BSC enables companies to track short‐term financial results while simultaneously monitoring their progress in building the capabilities and acquiring the intangible assets that generate growth for future financial performance.

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 we 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.

Balanced Scorecard:

1. Balanced Scorecard for Performance Measurement

2. Strategic Objectives and Strategy Maps 

3. The Strategy Management System

4. Future Opportunities