Teleconference on Friday: Finessing Finance with Brand Assets

Mary Adams hosts the monthly Intangible Asset Finance Society (IAFS) Committee Spotlight on the first Friday of every month. This month, David Ruder of RPX Corporation will be talking about “Finessing finance with brand assets”

The call is on Friday, March 6, 2009 at 3:30 PM EST. It is open to the public but you must register in advance. More information and registration is here.

21st Century Skills

There was an editorial in the Boston Globe yesterday about “The Value of Teaching 21st Century Skills” that has set off a firestorm of comments, mostly negative. The writer, Maura Banta, sets out the view:

That is why the debate over the value of teaching students so-called “21st century skills” is baffling. These skills include problem-solving, financial and business literacy, global awareness, and innovation. A vocal minority disregard them as “soft skills,” others recognize them for what they truly are: the number one job requirements for anyone interested in success after high school. Read more

Radical Transparency

Daniel Roth has a great article in Wired on the need for what he calls “radical transparency.”

He makes the case that so many of the “unexpected” events of our current downturn could not have been known by the investing public (and possibly the regulators) because the data was hidden in private sources. Read more

Intellectual Capital Advisors Signs Book Contract

We are thrilled to announce that we have signed a contract with Praeger’s Greenwood Press for a book with the working title Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century Corporation.

The book will be a practical guide to managers on how to get more bang for their buck today and better innovation for tomorrow–by improving their intangibles management practices.

Praeger is a serious press with a very deep business list. They are very supportive of this topic. It was especially great to hear that this blog helped them understand our message!

We’ll be moving fast on this. Stay tuned for more details.

Intangibles and the Moment of Truth

Michael Mandel at Business Week has a powerful new video here about the stock market and our economy. Basically, he says the inflation adjusted return on the stock market (prices and dividends) over the past decade is -50%. This is equal to the decline in the Great Depression.

Mandel is talking about “the moment of truth” for investors in the stock market. I think it is a moment of truth for our nation. Read more

Danger: Your professors may be sucking you into their time warp

I was recently invited to  speak to an MBA accounting class about how the knowledge economy represents such a huge challenge (and opportunity) to the field of accounting. The students and the professor were very receptive and open to the fact that huge changes are inevitable in accounting if it is going to remain relevant over time.

However, I was struck as I overheard lessons Read more

Investment Tax Credits 2.0 — We Need to Consider Intangibles

An article in Business Week here about a conversation going on between Silicon Valley and Washington DC about the possibility of creating an IT innovation tax credit. This is a step in the right direction. Many of the dollars spent on IT are consulting and integration dollars which are not considered “investments” by accountants. But they  definitely are investments. Read more

The Rush to Discount Intangibles

Ignorance and lack of thinking about intangibles drives me crazy. Here’s an example from Bloomberg about Wells Fargo which David Reilly contends here has “pumped up” its equity with “squishy” assets, in this case a mortgage-servicing right which:

…reflects the value today of future income from a bank’s right to collect and process payments on the mortgages it sells to investors. At issue is whether investors should look at this asset the same way they do other, more tangible, assets such as cash, loans and bond holdings.

They probably shouldn’t. While that would make today’s strained balance sheets look even worse, especially at Wells, it would give investors a more realistic view of their true financial strength…

The problem is that the value of servicing rights is more difficult to estimate, let alone depend on, in today’s tumultuous markets and economy. That has ladled uncertainty onto what is usually a pretty steady business.

Sounds very sound on the surface right? Except that the uncertainty affecting intangibles such as these (which are assets with an income stream attached) is not greater than the uncertainty surrounding the value of loans and bonds. Just because you consider something “tangible” does not make it more “valuable” than  an intangibles. It is lazy thinking to use these labels to evaluate assets. Intangibles are far more important in many businesses today than tangibles. Get used to it. Learn to get below the surface of labels and think about the true underlying risks.

Coming Soon: More Legal Attention to Intangible Value

On Friday, I hosted the monthly conference series for the Intangible Asset Finance Society (IAFS). The speaker was Cathy Reese who heads the Corporate and Chancery Litigation practice at Fish & Richardson. She made a compelling argument that IP will be the next focus for shareholder suits. She warned that companies need to protect themselves by creating clear processes for reviewing Read more

How to Measure Innovation, A Reading List

I recently put together this list for a colleague and thought it might be valuable for others:

My favorite source is on innovation and measurement is “The Innovation Value Chain” by Morten Hansen and Julian Birkinshaw in the Harvard Business Review here.  Very clear and simple.

The annual Boston Consulting Group study “Measuring Innovation 2008″ Read more

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