Current methods of intellectual property exchange are inefficient and often hinder companies from easily realizing value from existing IP assets. In addition, intellectual property enforcement is costly and uncertain and entails lengthy negotiations or legal actions.
As a result, necessary IP rights are not effectively transferred, the 'best price' for IP is rarely achieved, and the process itself inhibits the market adoption of new technology based products and hence their companies' economic growth.
What is Intellectual Capital?
Intellectual capital is a term with various definitions in different theories of economics. Accordingly its only truly neutral definition is as a debate over economic "intangibles". Ambiguous combinations of instructional capital and individual capital employed in productive enterprise are usually what is meant by the term, when it is used to actually refer to a capital asset whose yield is intellectual rights.Such use is rare, however, and the term rarely or never appears in accounting proper - it refers to a debate, and to the assumed capital base that creates intellectual property, rather than an auditable style of capital.
Perhaps due to their industry focus, the term "intellectual capital" is employed mostly by theorists in information technology, innovation research, technology transfer and other fields concerned primarily with technology, standards, and venture capital.
It was particularly prevalent in 1995-2000 as theories proliferated to explain the "dotcom boom" and high valuations. During this period it was often observed that computer code and programmers were bearing a substantial premium when combined in new unproven companies.
It is hard to see how this differs from the tulip boom, however, when it would have been just as likely to assign a high value to the seemingly-magical combinations of tulip bulbs and, say, the pots they grew in.Brand as an AssetWhether flags, brands, labels or simple fear dominate economic decisions, it seems that the underlying theories of intellectual capital and of human capital don't explain them.
When attached to "capital" as prefixes, the terms "intellectual", "knowledge" and "human" often conceal more than their use can reveal. Thus the terms intellectual capital, knowledge capital and human capital more properly describe debates, not assets, as internally generated assets do not appear on a balance sheet, however International Financial Reporting Standard 3 on Business Combinations requires acquired intangible assets to be accounted for during the purchase price allocation exercise.
They produce neat abstractions but so far poorly explain what actually occurs in the biologically real world: individuals buying in a social setting based on instructions.So far, the more specific terms "individual", "instructional" and "social" from human development theory, have been preferred in Wikipedia as adjectives describing classes of capital. In part this is because these terms have definitions that arise from academic categories and practices rather than faddish marketing or management theories.
There are standards for assigning value to these, e.g. the UN Human Development Index which literally ranks flags (of countries) for quality of life.Extending such standards to labels (via mandatory labelling) and applying them positively in brand management, e.g. positioning a brand for appeal to an ethical minority, is increasingly common.
Projects by Consumerium and AdBusters seek to make comprehensive outcomes more important in buying decisions. This in turn is part of a trend towards more moral purchasing.When viewed as an asset, then, a brand is simple social capital that may have an increasing amount of instructional capital attached to satisfy an ever-rising demand for more information about product origin,