The Intangible Drivers of Business Value

I was thrilled this month to have the opportunity to give a webinar for Business Valuation Resources on intangibles. I showed the audience the usual slides I often use to show the growth in intangibles in our economy.

The lessons for valuation professionals is two fold:

1. They will be valuing many more intangibles as stand-alone assets in the future
2. But they should already be considering the intangible drivers of corporate value NOW

My talk focused on the second point. Read more

I’ll be speaking at the Concord Festival of Authors

…On Halloween night! It’s about writing a non-fiction book, not about Intangible Capital directly.  It looks like a great festival. Hope to see you there!

Clay Christensen on National Innovation—and Intangible Capital

I tweeted the other day that I was going to see Clay Christensen but hadn’t shared my thoughts about the presentation.

Over the years, I have read Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, Innovator’s Solution and Disrupting Class (and have Innovator’s Prescription on my reading pile).

His ideas about disruption are very powerful. In his talk in Boston the other day, he took an issue that he said he had never addressed before: the lessons of disruption for the U.S. economy and jobs.

He made an incredibly compelling case why managers across the U.S. have continued to cede ground to lower-cost competitors (disrupting their markets) on the logic that they should focus on their highest-margin products. He pointed out several times that these decisions are totally valid within the doctrine taught at business schools today. Profits are king.

The only problem is that the disruptors end up taking these higher margin products away too and leaving the former market leaders with nothing. He used the example of AsusTek and Dell. How Dell kept outsourcing more and more of their business to Asustek until Asustek has basically moved into direct competition with Dell. You can now buy Asus branded product in Best Buy. Dell launched the business that now competes with it. Read more

Moneyball and Intangibles

As the wife of a baseball expert (and co-author with Michael of Beisbol) I known for years about Bill James, Sabermetrics and Michael Lewis’ book, Moneyball, that inspired the new movie starring Brad Pitt. So I was more than happy to head out on the opening weekend to see the movie.

What I didn’t expect was how much it felt to me like a parable about intangibles and innovation.

Here’s the Moneyball story: Baseball lends itself really well to statistical analysis because every move can be and is counted. If you’ve ever been to a baseball game, you’ve probably seen a fan in the stands keeping track of the progress of the game: each batter’s strikes, balls and hits. For a hit, there is an accounting of the fielding of the ball and the advancement of the runners.

These statistics have always been available through annual compilations and huge baseball encyclopedias. Fans of the game have pored over these stats for more than a hundred years. Read more

Intangible Capital Reading List on Twitter for 2011-09-29

• RT @Tools4Fire: Lead knowledge workers as conductors guide an orchestra. Avoid outdated command+control methods. Read – "Intangible Capital" #
• Communities of practice create intangible capital (thanks to @mloxton) http://t.co/YsiIHcrX #
• Yes! Another mainstream biz press examination of the role of intangibles in corporate value http://t.co/Ejg0NvpT #
• Roos says look at staff as a fixed cost, with the largest potential for value creation, rather than a variable cost' http://t.co/Cnt3o6mx #

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Intangible Capital Reading List on Twitter for 2011-09-28

• RT @tripathyr: Intellectual Capital is potentially infinite, where as monetary capital is definitely finite. #
• RT @kehamill: To stay on top as a nation, we need to grow beyond brute strength. The strategy of sustainability +IC :http://t.co/vxJqYM3P #
• Cyclicality of IP filings RT @1p_com_au: Intangible assets – the new economic indicator http://t.co/dF91WpN7 #
• David Brooks uses the words holistic and emergent. This is the right kind of thinking for today's challenges http://t.co/Pa45dP9q #
• Holistic, emergent and long term. Also the kind of thinking necessary for intangible capital management. Do you have what it takes? #
• Nuances on the future of manufacturing in the U.S.. http://t.co/iHv2DTxT #
• "Harvesting Intangible Assets" great title. But sorry to see emphasis on IP without a broader IC perspective. http://t.co/IWCHCzwD #

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Intangible Capital Reading List on Twitter for 2011-09-27

• Capital markets in the knowledge era – power from the bottom up http://t.co/72ogfozM #

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Intangible Capital Reading List on Twitter for 2011-09-23

• I'm on my way to a talk by Clay Christensen. My first time to hear about disruptive innovation directly from him! #

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Intangible Capital Reading List on Twitter for 2011-09-22

• Thomas Friedman: "we can either have a hard decade or a bad century" http://t.co/zsgE7pHT #

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Intangible Capital Reading List on Twitter for 2011-09-21

• The knowledge era is about bottom-up solutions. Is this the answer for manufacturing too? http://t.co/RKn78rmR #

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