Knowledge is a fundamentally different kind of economic asset

You have probably heard of the the Knowledge Era. You know that we shifted from the Industrial to the Knowledge Era sometime in the recent past. What you may not understand is the implication of this shift for economics–and for your own organization.

The big difference comes from this simple fact: Knowledge is infinite. Yes, you heard me correctly. Knowledge is an infinite asset. Giving it away or selling it does not diminish your supply of knowledge. This infinite nature of knowledge conflicts with one of the most basic assumptions of the economics that most of learned in school: Read more

Knowledge starts as a commodity…how it ends up depends on how it is packaged to meet a market need

The first thing to understand about knowledge is that, like oil, it is almost like a commodity, widely used and widely available. You could almost describe it as a natural resource. This resource is widely available in any library, on the Internet and given away regularly on television and in public schools.

There is no more graphic demonstration of this than the recent launching of the MITOpenCourseWare website by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Read more

The Moment is Now to Leverage Our Knowledge Intangibles

Intangibles make up 70% of the value of the average company. They drive competitive advantage. They determine the innovation capacity of a company. Yet they continue to be ignored.

And now we are at a moment of truth. Our economy seemingly made huge progress in the past decades. Computers created efficiencies and fueled profits. They also enabled many white collar jobs to be moved off shore along with manufacturing work. The economic consequences of this outsourcing and the mothballing of so much of our economic infrastructure were hidden by a series of economic booms in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. Then the “Great Recession” of 2008-09 exposed the fact that our economy was running on consumer spending fueled by financial profits that have long since disappeared. Today, we lack sources of job creation and true economic growth. Add to this economic challenge the even greater ones created by serious concerns about our environment, our energy use, our health care system, even our food production. We are in a very difficult position. Read more

The Answer to Your Questions Is Probably Inside Your Company

There was a great story in the NY Times awhile back about the new co-CEO at Motorola, Sanjay Jha, Strategy of New Chief at Motorola Appears Poised to Pay Off. It explained:

Looking back, Mr. Jha said that Motorola was in worse shape than he knew when he took the job, largely because of a dysfunctional management culture that missed the shift in consumer preferences from phones intended primarily for talking to those that do nearly everything a computer can do. The company’s engineering talent, which had once developed great phones, remained intact, he said.

As luck would have it, one of those engineers, Rick Osterloh, grabbed Mr. Jha just as he stepped off the stage at that first town meeting in August 2008. Read more

What’s the Right Definition of Intellectual Property?

We have been circulating review copies of our book. We make the case that structural capital–knowledge captured in the organization–falls into two main categories: process and intellectual property (IP).

And the most controversial part has been our contention that:

All the knowledge that is captured and recorded in your company is IP… Read more

What will next year’s Labor Day look like?

Today is a strange Labor Day. The holiday was created as a way to get back to work. Yet the U.S. economy currently has a high unemployment rate, not counting those that have stopped looking for work and those that are independent and/or permanent contractors, whose work (or lack of) does not get counted in these statistics.

This unemployment is happening at a moment of incredible challenge (and, yes, opportunity). The challenges facing our nation (and our globe) include the need for sustainable energy production and use (to avoid wars and to save the environment), the need for sensible health care, the need for healthy food and the need for better education (I’m sure you can think of many more). Each one of these challenges represents opportunities that could fuel our economy for decades.

Yet here we sit. Paralyzed by assumptions and models that are failing us. Read more

You Can Grow Like Google (start with a knowledge factory)

In a few recent presentations that I have posted on the internet, I have included some slides that show the method that we have been using to model the knowledge side of our clients’ businesses using Lego’s. A number of people have written to me asking for a narrated version so I finally made the leap to YouTube.

You can view the You Can Grow Like Google video at YouTube and download the companion white paper Want to Grow Like Google.

Let me know if this is helpful to you. Share your own knowledge factory models. And, if it is helpful, please share this with colleagues whose companies need a boost to power out of this recession. I hope to hear some feedback on this one!

Knowledge is the New Oil – And Intellectual Capital is Your New Factory

If I ask you whether we live in the industrial or the knowledge era, you wouldn’t hesitate. You know that our economy has transitioned.

That doesn’t mean that industry and manufacturing have gone away, just that they are not the dominant source of value creation. Agriculture didn’t go away when the industrial era began. Industry won’t go away with the rise of the knowledge era.

But I find that most managers don’t have explicit models for the role of knowledge in their business. They know it’s there. They know what to do with it. But they are dealing with it all on a gut level. But you don’t want to rely exclusively on your gut to manage your business. Read more

Does Your Intellectual Capital Walk Out the Door at Night?

You know how people always say that the value of a business walks out the door at night? They are right on one level. Human capital is a critical part of every business, more so all the time as we move more deeply into the knowledge economy.

But there is more to intellectual capital than what’s inside your employees’ heads. And if you worry about your value walking out the door, you better understand the rest of the story. Read more

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