I find definitions to be extremely limiting. They become permanent representations of the thing being defined and leave no room for interpretation, adaptation, or evolution over time. Instead I like to think about the distinctions of something.
Distinctions allow something to take on different guises in different contexts.
They allow you to accumulate a list of those manifestions and characteristics over time. They also allow you to include what something is not in addition to what it is , to set boundaries around the thing being described. They provide people with a much richer sense of meaning and understanding. In short, something moves from being a dead set of words to being alive in the mind of the receiver. Including different people's definitions of intellectual capital or knowledge in a book or article is a method of beginning to list their distinctions.