Put It to Work - the Relationship Between Intellectual Assets & Growth
Intellectual Assets include the special skills and knowledge your business has. No doubt you have key staff who provide value to the business. Your business will not only have skills to do what it does, but also a lot of experience acquired along the way. Depending on your business you will have preciously guarded lists of clients, suppliers, and people you can depend upon in for dealing with certain issues. You probably have in-house trade secrets which allow you to compete more effectively in the market place.
These are some of the Intellectual Assets that you probably didn't know you had. Until now.
Most businesses are very poor at recognising their Intellectual Assets, and
These Intellectual Assets can help spawn new businesses complementary to the core business. In times of recession, or extreme market place competition, this diversity can keep an organisation afloat or ahead. Spreading your eggs in several baskets, so to speak.
At another level, the Intellectual Assets of a business may be under utilised for creating new innovation. Much has been written about the role, and need, for innovation in growing businesses. Just look at the car industry - do people really need to update their car every few years so they can be seen in the latest design with a few extra gadgets? Imagine just producing the same model year after year. Possibly okay for a certain sector of the truck market, but it won't keep selling cars. Even the ubiquitous postwar Volkswagen Beetle, whose virtually unchanging shape is an icon, had a marketing campaign highlighting subtle innovative improvements.
It is the Intellectual Assets which can be used to create the innovations of use to your business.
And it is these innovations which may, depending on the strategy, be taken into the realm of Intellectual Property, which is opens a new realm of possibilities.
It's a little like a builder using his hammer and saw to create sufficient value to upgrade to a power saw and electric drill. Now the limits of what they can do have expanded.
Intellectual Assets include the special skills and knowledge your business has. No doubt you have key staff who provide value to the business. Your business will not only have skills to do what it does, but also a lot of experience acquired along the way. Depending on your business you will have preciously guarded lists of clients, suppliers, and people you can depend upon in for dealing with certain issues. You probably have in-house trade secrets which allow you to compete more effectively in the market place.
These are some of the Intellectual Assets that you probably didn't know you had. Until now.
Most businesses are very poor at recognising their Intellectual Assets, and
- using them more effectively to grow the business, and
- securing the very assets responsible for the livelihood of the business.
These Intellectual Assets can help spawn new businesses complementary to the core business. In times of recession, or extreme market place competition, this diversity can keep an organisation afloat or ahead. Spreading your eggs in several baskets, so to speak.
At another level, the Intellectual Assets of a business may be under utilised for creating new innovation. Much has been written about the role, and need, for innovation in growing businesses. Just look at the car industry - do people really need to update their car every few years so they can be seen in the latest design with a few extra gadgets? Imagine just producing the same model year after year. Possibly okay for a certain sector of the truck market, but it won't keep selling cars. Even the ubiquitous postwar Volkswagen Beetle, whose virtually unchanging shape is an icon, had a marketing campaign highlighting subtle innovative improvements.
It is the Intellectual Assets which can be used to create the innovations of use to your business.
And it is these innovations which may, depending on the strategy, be taken into the realm of Intellectual Property, which is opens a new realm of possibilities.
It's a little like a builder using his hammer and saw to create sufficient value to upgrade to a power saw and electric drill. Now the limits of what they can do have expanded.
