Intellectual Capital Management Practice (ICM)

Today, many organizations recognize the importance of intellectual capital as a principal driver of firm performance and a core differentiator. The only constant in the world of business is change. Sometimes change is incremental and sometimes it's revolutionary. Consequently, as business changes so do the skills of those leading and managing business, thus requiring universities to remain both diligent and innovative in their task of preparing tomorrow's leaders. The realization among corporations that the majority of their assets are intangible in nature has created a paradigm shift in the economy to what can be called “Intellectual Capitalism.”

A firm's intellectual capital (IC) can be broken down into two main categories – human capital (HC) and structural capital (SC). Structural capital represents the intellectual capital that is owned by the corporation, including intellectual property, external relationships, and internal management processes to name a few. Human capital in the form of ideas, competences, initiative, and experience is owned by the employee and must therefore be transformed into structural capital in order for it to become a corporate asset. To generate corporate wealth and competitive advantage, firms must learn to effectively manage and facilitate the transformation of the human capital retained by their employees to structural capital in the form of commercially exploitable corporate-controlled assets. In order to effectively manage IC, interdisciplinary knowledge is required thus necessitating the convergence of technical, managerial, economic, financial, and legal expertise. Traditionally these disciplines have been taught separately with crossover as the exception instead of the rule. Although the need for specialists will always be important, the generalist possessing a clear view of the “big picture” is demanded in today's corporate and economic environment. ICM allows us to see the forest through the trees.

What is Intellectual Capital?

Intellectual capital consists of information, knowledge, software, experience, wisdom, and ideas that are structured to enable sharing for re-use and to deliver value to customers and shareholders. The critical words in this definition are "structured to enable sharing for re-use". These words distinguish the body of all information and deliverables we have ever produced from the best of breed that can be re-used to add value to our clients and to our business. If information, knowledge, objects, experience, wisdom, and ideas are not shared and re-used systematically, they do not contribute effectively to our knowledge base. They are not truly intellectual capital. Intellectual capital should meet some or all of the following criteria:

Re-usable in a variety of contexts.
Does not have significant confidentiality issues.
Is not too large (or small) to be re-used effectively.
Exemplifies an innovative concept, approach, or solution applied to a     client situation.
Creates or enhances a methodology, technique, or architecture.
Provides unique and effective visual representations/graphics of    concepts, processes.
Presents a comprehensive summary of research or other information    that practitioners can use for their own professional development.
Provides guidance on overcoming a problem, established value, etc.

Examples of intellectual capital may include such items as:

Project deliverables, for example: proposals, work plans, reports, meeting agendas, presentations, designs, code, instructional materials, process maps, etc.
Tools used to implement a process such as checklists, surveys, questionnaires, models, templates.
Software code, class libraries, models, architectures.
Project profiles.

Intellectual Capital Management (ICM) is a framework that incorporates:

Vision, strategy and a value system that supports sharing and     re- using intellectual capital.
Processes for efficiently gathering, evaluating, structuring and    distributing intellectual capital.
Communities of professionals with defined roles and responsibilities.
Technology that enables global sharing.
Incentives to encourage intellectual capital contribution and re-use.
Measurements for monitoring knowledge usage and its value to the    organization.

Fundamentally, ICM is about connecting people together - connecting the people who have knowledge with those who need knowledge. This produces a networked community of professionals who can create, share and build upon knowledge. The key is managing the intellectual capital - collecting what is available; evaluating it to ensure quality; structuring it to make it easy to share and re-use; and publishing it within a system that has powerful search tools to facilitate finding the relevant IC. This ability to work together and re-use our existing knowledge means that you can provide our clients with the best possible solution in the shortest possible time. The result is a networked community of professionals who can create, share and build upon knowledge - across time and distance.

Leveraging Organizational Intellectual Capital

A company’s greatest wealth is its wealth of knowledge. Yet in most organizations, the knowledge and skills of employees are greatly underused. SQC Consultants can uncover latent knowledge and ensure that employees’ ideas and wisdom are captured, shared and applied throughout the organization. Our consulting strategy has a dual focus:

To create a culture of knowledge sharing through a variety of    methods, such as encouraging examination of “lessons learned,”    and building work cultures and team processes that allow ideas to    surface.
To implement an Information Technology system that enables    managers, employees, and teams to access these ideas and lessons    and disperse them worldwide. This base of captured knowledge    remains even after the contributing employees have left the    company.

We help clients avoid the pitfalls and risks of starting up and implementing knowledge management. Business goals form the basis for determining what to look for and how to capitalize on ideas. We assess the revealed capacities to determine:

How and where to apply them
Where the learning gaps are.

Leveraging the organization’s intellectual capital can be far more profitable than leveraging monetary resources. Typical benefits realized by our clients through our ICM Consulting engagements:

A blueprint for combining intellectual resources to move forward
Knowledge sharing across borders and time zones
A stronger globalization strategy
Improvement in core competencies
Ability to capitalize on what makes the organization unique
Rapid solutions to problems without costly reinvention of the wheel
A learning culture in which employees share knowledge as a matter    of course
Substitution of new ideas for repetitive actions that haven’t produced    desired results

In addition to consulting and assessment, we also offer a customized ICM workshop tailored to the needs of your organization and the type of industry.