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June Newsletter from ICA
Having trouble viewing this email? Click here Management 2.0 Leveraging the growing intangible side of your business In This Issue Smarter Companies IC Knowledge Center ICA News Quick Links Services Speaking Topics About Sign-up ... [Read more...]
Simple but Powerful Ways to Generate Ideas and Track Satisfaction
Michael Fraser is someone who gets the power of using technology to put knowledge to work within the organization. He has held a number of positions since I first met him. Currently he is the Recovery Act Program Manager for the Loan Guarantee Program Office at the Department of Energy. He recently wrote to me:
One experience I wanted to share was about employee ideas for improvement. On a former project known as CHRIS, one of the major subsystems was Employee Self Service which was a home grown web site built in Cold Fusion. All employees and contractors had access although the contractors’ was limited to a smaller subset of functions. [Read more...]
Redeploying Agricultural Intellectual Capital
The challenges facing the food industry provide an important chapter in the story about the end of the industrial era.
In past posts, I have talked about how the large industrial model has lead to dangerous monocultures in bananas and unsustainable concentration of salad green production in the Salinas Valley. There is a growing realization that we need to think about sustainability in agriculture. This is a significant challenge–but also an enormous opportunity. [Read more...]
Knowledge is the New Oil - And Intellectual Capital is Your New Factory
If I ask you whether we live in the industrial or the knowledge era, you wouldn’t hesitate. You know that our economy has transitioned.
That doesn’t mean that industry and manufacturing have gone away, just that they are not the dominant source of value creation. Agriculture didn’t go away when the industrial era began. Industry won’t go away with the rise of the knowledge era.
But I find that most managers don’t have explicit models for the role of knowledge in their business. They know it’s there. They know what to do with it. But they are dealing with it all on a gut level. But you don’t want to rely exclusively on your gut to manage your business. [Read more...]
Intangible Metrics
I had an inquiry over the weekend from a reader about setting metrics for intangibles. Here’s my first level response.
One of my favorite articles about metrics is by Ian Graham, What’s Wrong with Targets? (it’s on page 15 of this document). It sums up most of the problems that happen with metrics.
The way I see it, there are two types of metrics: [Read more...]
How can we use IT to optimize our Intellectual Capital?
I received a call the other day from the administrator of a good-sized Sharepoint implementation. He had actually fielded a number of requests from managers in his organization about how to use IT to optimize IC.
Wow. I love questions like that, especially since I have had a category on this blog since last year called IT=IC. They were thinking in terms of knowledge management. I think that’s a great place to start but doesn’t get to the most exciting part. That’s because knowledge in itself is not that big a deal. [Read more...]
The Growing Importance of Community and Relationship Capital
Two of my recent Tweets @maryadamsica told stories about the growing importance of relationship capital:
What is Buddhist Economics - Showed the incredible difference in the growth of Business Week’s print edition versus their BW Exchange, where readers choose the topics. [Read more...]
IC Knowledge Center- IC of Sweden takes me to SpainThe IC5 was held just last month. It is a conference in Paris initiated by Ahmed Bonfour and it also has a close relation to the intellectual capital group, the New Club of Paris (where I happen to be a founding member - although so far limited in my participation...). ...
- IC - your IP protectorNot surprisingly, my answer to securing income from your innovations when IP protection regulations fails, is intellectual capital. I am of course referring to my post yesterday about the Pirate Party, but also to many other situations where IP regulations in reality does not serve as a protector. This is a ...
- IC in an internal departmentRight now, we are helping an internal IT department better understand their Intellectual Capital through an IC assessment. These types of projects can be rather eye-opening, as internal departments do not normally operate in a true market environment. If you think about it, they are usually operating in the abhorred plan economy ...
- IC of Sweden takes me to Spain