What You can Learn from the Grateful Dead
The willingness to “give away” their music through fan recordings made the Dead stand out in their business. Every company has extensive knowledge assets. Knowledge resides in the competencies of your people, your processes, your intellectual property, your brands and your relationships with vendors and other external partners (for more information on the study of this kind of knowledge asset, visit the IC Knowledge Center).
Once you have a good understanding of what you “know”, you then have to decide where and when to give it away and where and when to charge for it. Here are some questions to ask about your company that will help you decide:
- What do people really value about us?
- What are we really getting paid for?
- Are we charging at the right point in the value chain?
- Is there a different way to get paid for our intangibles?
- What can we give away that will show what we have and leave people wanting more?
- Michael Oleksak 2007
