Defining Intellectual Property: The Rest of the Story

A few weeks ago as we were circulating drafts of our book Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century Organization, I posted about the dilemma we were facing of what to call structural capital What is the Right Definition of Intellectual Property.

In the initial draft, we made the case that all structural capital is intellectual property. The aim was to help businesspeople see that all knowledge is valuable and that IP, while important, is not the only kind of knowledge asset and is not the only strategy for protecting knowledge assets.

We received a large number of comments privately and on the blog. While I am not one to back down easily:), it was clear that the tack we took with the definitions was going to create more confusion than it would solve.

Our last commenter Galen McPherson summed up the conversation in a compelling way:

I agree that all captured knowledge is part of structural capital, but I am hesitant to allow this categorization of structural capital to become equated with Intellectual Property, an already defined and heritage-rich field. IP is a significant subset of structural capital, but it is not the superset of all knowledge artifacts…Thanks for giving me a chance to share.

So here’s how we ended up explaining structural capital:

…Structural capital is the Holy Grail of knowledge economy. It is the way that your organization captures knowledge and makes it re-usable…For purposes of this book and of your own understanding of your business, we will discuss four basic forms of structural capital: organizational knowledge, intellectual property (IP), culture, and processes.

Please know that there is a lot of overlap between these forms. Organizational knowledge, for example, can be converted to process and may even be protected as IP. We make the distinction mainly to be able to talk about specific characteristics of the individual forms even though all structural capital is, at its roots, captured knowledge of one form or another.

We leave the definition of IP as patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets. And describe briefly the fact that these each have specific legal protection. But we go on to say that contracts, process and a good business model (even business recipe) are also important protection alternatives for all kinds of intangible capital (including IP).

Thanks to all who contributed to the conversation. Let’s keep the ideas flowing!