What is the relative importance of intangibles (versus tangibles) in your business? Do you try to measure this? Do your stakeholders understand your intangibles? View and post comments
2 Comments → “Are intangibles important to the success of your business?”
We are a consulting company, so in a sense most our stakeholders understand that our intangibles are our most important value creators. The challenge is to make the stakeholders realize that they too should value intangibles much higher in their own businesses even though they consider themselves to be industry players.
When we ask our stakeholders they usually say that our people and their competencies are our intangibles. I say, yes, but arguably not the most important ones. We have packaged our competencies into structured services which make our individual competence levels less important. This structural capital is probably just as important as our human capital.
The second intangible that drives our corporate value is a license network of 30 companies on five continents. All which are educated in our packaged services. At this stage I would argue that this Relational Capital is even more important than our people.
It may not be as easy for other companies to distinguish various intangibles from each other. A good beginning is to make the inventory of your intangibles as is suggested in this book.
Answering to your question, I would like to go much broader, and would love to paraphrase Sir. Ken Robinson, a thing he writes in his praised book The Element.
“When the only thing we know about the future is that it will be different, we would all be wise to do the same”.
So, we need to think very differently about our intangibles and about how we develop them if we are to face challenges in front of us. First, we should leave behind this preoccupation with certain sorts of academic ability: some sorts of critical analysis and reasoning, particularly with words and numbers.
Only than the question you have asked would be obsolete and we would ask ourselves how many and diverse intangibles we do share with others as they do with us.
Recognizing intangibles should be sort of standard not competeitive advantage. We’re still pioniring at this subject no matter how far we’ve already moved.
Peder Hofman-Bang
2 years ago
We are a consulting company, so in a sense most our stakeholders understand that our intangibles are our most important value creators. The challenge is to make the stakeholders realize that they too should value intangibles much higher in their own businesses even though they consider themselves to be industry players.
When we ask our stakeholders they usually say that our people and their competencies are our intangibles. I say, yes, but arguably not the most important ones. We have packaged our competencies into structured services which make our individual competence levels less important. This structural capital is probably just as important as our human capital.
The second intangible that drives our corporate value is a license network of 30 companies on five continents. All which are educated in our packaged services. At this stage I would argue that this Relational Capital is even more important than our people.
It may not be as easy for other companies to distinguish various intangibles from each other. A good beginning is to make the inventory of your intangibles as is suggested in this book.
Domagoj Juricic
2 years ago
Answering to your question, I would like to go much broader, and would love to paraphrase Sir. Ken Robinson, a thing he writes in his praised book The Element.
“When the only thing we know about the future is that it will be different, we would all be wise to do the same”.
So, we need to think very differently about our intangibles and about how we develop them if we are to face challenges in front of us. First, we should leave behind this preoccupation with certain sorts of academic ability: some sorts of critical analysis and reasoning, particularly with words and numbers.
Only than the question you have asked would be obsolete and we would ask ourselves how many and diverse intangibles we do share with others as they do with us.
Recognizing intangibles should be sort of standard not competeitive advantage. We’re still pioniring at this subject no matter how far we’ve already moved.