IP Zones - Creating Communities to Monetize Intellectual Capital

Jackie Hutter’s IP Maximizer Blog has a great post that introduces the Manhattan Empowerment Zone which is a way of leveraging a community to create jobs while providing a critical mass of services to corporations looking for markets for their IP. Read more

Program on Relationship Capital Risks this Friday

Mary Adams hosts the monthly call of the Intangible Asset Finance Society on the first Friday of every month. This month’s call on Friday, April 3rd at 12 noon EDT is entitled: IMPOSING PERFORMANCE (BEHAVIOR) REQUIREMENTS ON A COMMERCIAL PARTNER:

Cadbury Schweppes, Kellogg, Mattel - all iconic firms whose products, cash flows, and reputations have been sullied by their business partners through ethical breaches including melamine in milk, salmonella in peanut butter, and lead paint. Read more

More on Computerized Learning

A good follow-up to my review of Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson and Michael B. Horn. This book was about our education system but, I think, holds lessons for business as well.

Jay Cross’ thoughtful examination here is based on his many years of experience with e-learning in corporations. He defines the critical difference being push vs. pull learning. Pull learning involves and active learner on a journey of conversation and discovery. Great guidelines for those looking to use computers to improve learning (not just automate it).

Basic Mistakes, Huge Consequences on Wall Street

I heard an interview on the radio this week of William Cohan, author of House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street. His take on the fall of Bear Stearns brought me back to my banking days for two reasons.

First, he boiled down the story to a very simple explanation. Bear Stearns was holding huge amounts of securitized mortgages, which are long-term obligations. But they were funding their investments with overnight borrowings, the shortest term obligations there are. Read more

The Newspaper Question

I have been thinking about the newspaper question ever since a NY Times writer engaged me in a conversation about a new business model for the industry.

I thought of her questions when I found this graph in PBS’ The First Measured Century that shows that newspaper circulation peaked in 1947.

This decline seems to have accelerated in recent months. It seems especially ironic because content is more highly valued than ever. But the media is changing. Can newspapers shift from being newspaper to being content providers?

Read more

Innovation = Unbounded Ideation + Bounded Process

One the huge challenges of an innovation strategy is that is is multi-dimensional. I always focus on innovation as both a process (structural capital) and innovation as an ecosystem (the entire intellectual capital system).

In a post in his Innovate on Purpose blog, Jeffry Phillips has an interesting take here on this kind of dynamic Read more

Crimes on Wall Street

Very interesting comparison here in this month’s Portfolio magazine by Gary Weiss between crimes on Wall Street and the extensive experience with ending police corruption.

In “Preventing the Next Madoff” he says:

The accepted wisdom is that financial scandals are an inevitable by-product of greed and human frailty-or even the price we pay for a wide-open system that supposedly gives Wall Street its competitive edge over the rest of the world. “Greed will always be with us,” says Lee Kjelleren, CEO of the Museum of American Finance, in Lower Manhattan. “We’re not going to change that.”

Except that maybe we can. Read more

The Stock Market is Not the Best Way to Value Intangibles

In the Value Networks discussion group here, someone recently asked the question about the value of intangibles now that the stock market has declined so precipitously. Many of us in the field have used the shorthand formula: market cap - tangible book value = intangibles.

This got me started and I posted the following answer. Most of these themes have been explored in previous posts but this one pulls a lot of it together… Read more

Strategy Should Not Revolve Around IP

There’s a new book out called The Invisible Edge: Taking Your Strategy to the Next Level Using Intellectual Property.  It reflects the authors’ deep knowledge of the IP space–Mark Blaxill and Ralph Eckardt, both formerly of Boston Consulting Group.

Their website includes some of the patent visualizations used in the book that were developed using a system that Eckert helped develop at BCG. There is real power to the drawing which show the network of intellectual property rights in specific industries.

But looking at these visualizations Read more

How to Increase the Return on Your IT Investments NOW

I love the fact that McKinsey is talking about IT as a strategic investment here and advising companies to avoid wholesale slashing of investments in “Managing IT in a downturn: Beyond cost cutting.”

There is a lot of good advice here. They lay out areas of opportunities for quick return for investment in specific business processes, as well as specific areas that can be ripe for short-term gain.

I think there is also a real opportunity in today’s environment to fine tune and increase your return on past investments. What I see with my clients is that the most important factor in success of IT investment is the accompanying ecosystem.

Read more

Next Page »