Intangible Capital, Banking and Innnovation

Our IC Practitioners program on Tuesday, November 8 will kick off with two representatives from the Brazilian Development Bank describing how they have incorporated IC analysis into their credit process.  There is a lot going on in the Brazilian economy and it will be exciting to learn the activities in this bank.

Our second speak will be Dr. Bill Miller talking about IC, innovation and job growth in the U.S.

The program is a free, web-based program at the IC Knowledge Center starting at 8 AM EST (our audience stretches from California around the globe to Australia so we start early in the U.S.). Please join us!

First anniversary of the IC Knowledge Center!

We have close to 250 members who have had 150+ postings and discussions in in the past year. Where to now? Become a part of the conversation.

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The Future of IC

Had a great time last week at the ICICKM conference in Hong Kong. I had hoped to share my thoughts in real time via twitter but I kept getting cut off.

The conference was held at Hong Kong Polytechnic University which has 20,000+ students. They have very vibrant knowledge management and intellectual capital programs. One of the stand-out presentations was by Stephen Selby from the Hong Kong Intellectual Property Department about their IC Management program that has been completed by 500+ local SME’s.

I led a track on Moving IC into the Mainstream all day Friday. We had some great papers and presentations on case studies of IC in practice (I will try to get the authors to share their papers).

I presented a paper that I co-authored with Verna Allee called Optimized for Growth, a case study of an IC approach to scaling a sales organization. Here are the slides of the case study too.

We capped off the track with a discussion led by John Dumay of the University of Sydney on the barriers and enablers of IC in practice. We posted the discussion bullets on the IC Knowledge Center.

Then we segued into the closing forum of the conference. Organizers WB Lee and Eric Tsui kindly gave me the opportunity to pitch my thoughts on how to shape IC practice going forward and invite the conference participants to join a project I am launching with John Dumay called The Future of IC at the IC Knowledge Center. The goal is to gather stories on how IC concepts are being used in practice. We are calling it an open conversation and research project. John will be analyzing the content of the stories in a sense-making exercise. We also invite others to use these stories for research and practice.

Hope you will join in the conversations!

About the Authors of Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century Organization

We (Mary Adams and Michael Oleksak) are both former bankers who began our careers just as the IBM PC hit the marketplace in the early 1980s. That was actually the moment when a discernible “extra” value became visible in the public markets over and above the book value of corporate assets. In hindsight, economists now tell us that this was when the knowledge era began to take off. We, like all businesspeople today, have lived with feet planted in both the industrial and knowledge eras. At Citibank and Bank of Boston, we each received training in state-of-the-art business thinking. But as time went by, it became clear that there was something else going on. The old formulae didn’t work. Assets wouldn’t cover the loan amounts companies needed to fund their operations. It was only later when we had started a consulting firm in the late 1990s, that we came to understand the shift that was underway.

Then over five years ago, we were introduced to the emerging field of intangible capital. We started an informational website, the IC Knowledge Center, and a newsletter (here’s its current incarnation) that became our way of continuing (and sharing) our learning. We also began to apply the concepts in our client work, helping technology and service companies to grow and adapt to changes in their markets. We began to see a lot of trends that have been emerging in recent years—social networking, innovation, performance and knowledge management—as threads of the same story. Eventually we felt compelled to write a book to pull all these threads together.

This is not the first book we have written together. We met and lived in the Dominican Republic over 20 years ago. At the time we were intrigued by the growing prominence of Latin Americans in baseball. We were upset when we would see sportswriters speculate (often incorrectly) on how and why baseball spread to different countries. When we couldn’t find a book on the rich history of this aspect of our national game, we decided to write it ourselves. With Beisbol, we helped set the record straight and start a new thread in the history of baseball.

This book isn’t all that different. We have lived with our clients the urgency of being able to measure, manage, and monetize intangibles. We have seen what works. But we haven’t been able to find a book that explains this in a clear, practical way. We felt we had no choice but to do it ourselves. Our hope is to get this information out to a broader audience and contribute to the important conversation about how to stimulate innovation and growth in our economy.

The ideas we express here are grounded in the best and most current research. But everything is filtered through the lens of our experience—and that of our clients—as to what really works. Our goal is to arm you with understanding and perhaps more importantly, practical tools and applications to help your organization succeed in the knowledge era.

From Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century Organization

Lessons Learned Creating an IC Community on Ning

If you follow this blog, you may have noticed a hiatus of ten days or so on my meatier posts (I keep the micro posts going through Twitter). Here’s what has been happening…

The IC Knowledge Center, a community I started at the beginning of the year is taking off! Coming at the same time that we are doing the final reviews for our book and keeping up with client work, it has been a bit of a distraction–but a wonderful one.

We just went over 125 members, all very impressive folks from all around the world. We are also getting a good start at critical mass of different perspectives. Read more