Why Do Your Customers Pay You for Your Knowledge?

Last week, I focused on how your company gets paid for its knowledge. Today, I’d like to focus on why your customers are willing to pay you.

This question is all the more acute given my post on Friday about the need to give away knowledge. This fact means that focusing exclusively on how you get paid will force you to miss some of the critical knowledge that distinguishes your organization.

In most cases, your customer is “buying” the whole package whether they pay for it or not, just as Google’s advertising are buying access to the users of the free service. So to understand Google’s search business or your own, you have to understand more than just the knowledge for which they get paid.

To identify the full picture of your critical knowledge, it is helpful then to move beyond the concept of products and services and ask three questions. Read more

The Dilemma (and Power) of Free

In recent days, I have focused on getting paid for what you know. But, of course, there is another big story in the knowledge economy—one that is still being written. Basically, one of the challenging truths of the knowledge economy is that you will end up giving away a lot of your knowledge.

Google’s search business is the simplest but most dramatic example of this. Their search business yields $20+ billion in advertising revenues each year. But the core product, the search itself, is free. This means that Google gives away huge amounts of value every day and still has managed to become one of the leading companies of the knowledge era thus far.

Another great example is the Grateful Dead. Read more

The Role of the Expert in Intangible Capital – Can We Open Source ICManagement Practices?

Before the holidays, I was at an international gathering of experts in IC and innovation. Over dinner one evening, I listened in on a conversation among several of my dinner partners about the role of the expert in helping companies leverage their intangible capital (aka intellectual capital).

They were firmly in agreement. Corporate managers could not enter into a project related to IC alone. They needed an expert.

To be honest, I didn’t chime in. I wasn’t really sure what to say. We moved on to another topic but in quiet moments (there haven’t been that many this month which is why I am just now getting back to this) the question would haunt me.

On the one hand, I guess they were right. This is certainly how I earn my living, as an expert in helping companies leverage their unique intangible capital for performance and value.

But, on the other hand, there is something wrong with this perspective. Companies should not need an expert. They should be educated and empowered to do a lot of their IC work themselves. The role of the expert should not be to lead the project and hold onto the “best practices.” The experts need to find ways to build IC capabilities inside every business. ICManagement is too important to outsource. Read more