The Holy Grail of the Knowledge Economy: Structural Capital
If you understand human and relationship capital, you can start a business. If your business creates value for your customers, you can earn a good living. But you will never grow large or particularly rich with just these two kinds of knowledge assets. This is because the real promise of the knowledge economy comes in [...]
Four Ways of Understanding Employees As Human Capital
Every human being is different. As employees, human beings bring unique talents and abilities to their employers. This diverse skills set brings a richness to an organization that can be difficult to capture. Do not let this richness keep you from trying to understand your human capital as a productive asset. There are actually some [...]
The Central Importance of Human Capital
Knowledge in an organization begins and ends with people. The knowledge and experience that employees bring to their work is probably the greatest driver of an organization’s success. What employees know helps to build an organization as well as to preserve, maintain and improve it.
This importance is generally accepted. It is rare to meet [...]
Intangibles Are the New Raw Materials
—Raw Materials In the tangible economy, raw materials are combined and sometimes transformed to make finished goods. It is often impossible to see the different raw materials in the finished product—together, they make something completely new. In fact, there is often a progression of processes that lead to a final product. Stalks of wheat, for [...]
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 [...]
Getting Paid Indirectly for Your Knowledge
For all the attention that we have paid to this point to direct sales of knowledge, many companies still get paid just for providing physical products. No services. No knowledge product. But don’t be fooled. These companies (or at least the ones that survive) get paid for their knowledge as well.
This is very obvious [...]
Getting Paid for What You Know: Knowledge Products
We talk about intangible capital a lot. We even wrote a book on it. But we know that a lot of people think that IC is a very abstract concept. It’s not. It’s at the very heart of how you create value for your customers and get paid for it.
Your company already has extensive [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
