Is Integrated Thinking the New Accounting Revolution?

Based on a global vision of value creation and the resources that contribute to it, Integrated Reporting aims to improve the information available to a company’s partners, and in particular its financial backers, in order to improve the allocation of financial resources within the economy. In so doing, Integrated Reporting challenges traditional financial reporting in its investor information function. In this chapter, we propose to provide some elements for assessing the promise of Integrated Reporting. This is based on a comparison of traditional financial accounting literature, which aims to account for the relevance and informational content of accounting rules, standards and numbers, and emerging literature, which aims to apply these same approaches to data from Integrated Reporting experiments to date. The results, based on a limited number of experiments, suggest that we should remain cautious about the extent of the improvement brought about by the deployment of Integrated Reporting.