In the middle of the 1990s, a number of OECD conferences were held to encourage attention to the question on how to account for intangibles. The OECD initiative was based on the notion that intangibles appear to be increasingly important as determinants of enterprise growth, productivity gains, profitability and wealth creation. However, the importance of intangibles exceeds the current ability to recognise and measure them. This gap is also evident in external reporting, which might cause miss-allocation in capital markets. At the OECD conference in Helsinki, 1996 two possible ways forward were identified. One was extending the use of human resource accounting (representing a financial approach) and the other was using the promising idea of intellectual capital (representing av non-financial approach). During the following two year, the two basic possibilities were discussed at a number of meetings took place and the idea of non-financial information focusing intangibles and the using of the concept IC was further enforced. consensus was reached that something has to be done in order to encourage the development of voluntary guidelines for using a non-financial approach when measuring, reporting and managing intangibles.