Amina

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

David Norton and I introduced the Balanced Scorecard in a 1992 Harvard

Business Review...