JP Morgan One of Few Looking Smart This Week

As the markets and our government have been roiled by the enormous crisis in the U.S. financial industry, JP Morgan Chase stood out this week for looking smart. As reported today in the New York Times, Morgan was able to raise $10 billion in new capital on Friday Read more

Training (and spending on intangibles in general) as an Investment?

Clive Shepherd asks whether spending on training is an investment in this thought-provoking post. He makes the comparison to spending on other kinds of business operations to highlight the challenges of going the investment route. Then he takes Read more

IBM’s Focus on Metrics

Business Week has a very interesting article by Stephen Baker based on his book The Numerati on the use of metrics in business. It describes how IBM is gathering and using data on its workers.

The data IBM is examining includes resumes (for skills), project records (experience) online calendars (use of time), cell phone use and emails (how employees communicate and with whom)–everything but personnel files, which are off limits. An example of the expected use of the data Read more

The Right C’s

An article just came out on CFO.com entitled “Who Needs a COO?” Reading it, I couldn’t help but think about the many articles I see all the time in Information Week about the changing role of the CIO. And it all makes me think that there is something that is still missing Read more

Intangibles at the National Academies

In June, 2008, the U.S. National Academies hosted a conference entitled Intangible Assets: Measuring and Enhancing Their Contribution to Corporate Value and Economic Growth. Many of the participants were economists from the U.S. government; a few academics and a small number of consultants and business people attended as well. You can scan Read more

Intangible Cost, Not Value

At the recent conference on Intangible Assets at the National Academies, the discussion “Intangibles in the Firm” consisted of two presentations, one by Baruch Lev, Professor of Accounting and Finance at the Stern School at NYU, and the other by Ron Bossio, Senior Project Manager from the Financial Accounting Standards Board.

It is not surprising that the organizers of the conference turned to two accountants to explain the “state of the art” of intangibles in the firm Read more

The Roots of Innovation

Innovation is a hot topic today. At ICA, we believe this is directly related to the growing importance of intellectual capital to business success. An innovative company has mastered the art of intellectual capital management.In trying to increase innovation, many focus first on the innovation process, to improve Read more

The New Building Blocks of Business

The growing importance of intellectual capital to the success of companies is leading to changes in the field of management. The best way to understand these changes is to visualize them in relation to the ten building blocks of a traditional business Read more

The Iceberg Effect

Up to 90% of the mass of an iceberg is below the waterline and invisible. That’s not too different from the average company. Today, performance, value and profits come from intangibles like people, knowledge and relationships, none of which are visible in traditional financial and management information.

Many consider these intangibles to be “soft” assets, nice to know about but not worthy of a lot of attention. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, that’s the kind of thinking that sent the Titanic to the bottom of the sea. These intangibles, which together form the intellectual capital of the modern business, have fueled the incredible wealth of smart companies in the past decade. Yet most companies still lack basic information about their intangibles.

The intangibles information gap–aka the “iceberg effect”–is a big problem. It forces managers to make decisions based on instinct rather than hard data. It limits the ability of boards of directors to see the full picture of a company’s health. It lowers the value that analysts can ascribe to an investment…   Limited decisions, limited oversight, limited valuations. It’s time to close the gap.

I-Capital Advisors helps companies, investors and advisors to extract tangible results from intangible assets. We have methodologies that help companies measure, manage and monetize intellectual capital. Our approach helped a service company triple in size, a consulting company nearly double their rates on their core offering, an information firm gain financing commitments, a software company complete a merger and a contracting firm re-engineer its core business processes.

Are you ready to get paid for what you know? You are in the right place.