Intellectual capital has achieved the status of the main determinant of the competitiveness of enterprises, and consequently also of entire economies. However, due to the abstractness, ambiguity and complexity of this category, individual authors define and divide it differently. The lack of a standard for understanding and classifying the national intellectual capital means that knowledge on this subject is fragmentary. The aim of this article is to review and systematize approaches to the categorization of the national intellectual capital and present the author's proposal for systematizing the capital structure and understanding its components.