Another Lego IC model: A Specialty Contractor

With the Google model, we told the story of how the company developed and built its knowledge factory starting with human capital.

But to model the IC of an established business, it often helps to start with how a company gets paid. This gets the focus directly on the value creation process and also ensures that the model is of maximum usefulness—making that direct link between IC and financial results. Read more

Three Ways to Look at IC

Intangible capital is still a very abstract concept to most people. As we begin to do more and more work that is explicitly related to IC optimization and corporate growth, we are finding three approaches to visualization that are especially  helpful.

Inventory - The first one is to look at a simple inventory of the key intangibles that drive an organization. This is usually focused on the revenue generation side of business. This is a high-level list but a good starting point for a discussion of the basic assets driving the organization’s operations. Read more

Why Should You Model Your Intellectual Capital?

In my last post, I shared a video that I recently posted on YouTube called You Can Grow Like Google. It uses Legos to build a model of Google’s intellectual capital “factory,” in an effort to illustrate how the distinct pieces of IC–human, relationship and structural capital–fit together to create a cohesive system that works together to create value.

You can download a worksheet to make your own model:  Want to Grow Like Google? …Build a Knowledge Factory. I hope you find the process fun and informative. I think that the act of identifying the critical components and fitting them together is a valuable exercise in itself. But I don’t recommend this just because it’s fun. I recommend that you build a model of your intellectual capital because the future of your business is dependent on intangible knowledge assets.  Read more