Intangible capital: 2013 welcomes smarter-companies

Today the IP Finance weblog's friend Mary Adams (see earlier posts here and here) has excitedly announced the launch of smarter-companies, which seeks to become a marketplace of consulting tools that help optimize the intangible capital that makes up 80% of the value of the average business today.  As Mary explains:

"... for many years we have had a great interest (some would say obsession!) about the role of intangible capital in the growth and competitiveness of companies. With the help of our clients and our broad network, we worked to develop tools and methodologies to support this thinking. And we created a web community to share our learnings because we felt strongly that one person or one company could never have all the answers. Until now, the community was known as the IC Knowledge Center.

The community attracted an international audience. 60% of the members are consultants. 20% are academics (many of whom also consult). The remainder includes attorneys, companies, non-profits, governments and solutions providers. Members' areas of specialization include intellectual/intangible capital, knowledge management, human capital, innovation, finance, information technology, marketing, performance management and intellectual property.

In short, our community looks like a map of the intangible capital of the organizations we serve. Yet the potential of our community's IC, like that of many organizations, has not been fully developed. That's why I made the decision to re-name the community and create a business model around it.

Going forward, we will be offering the products and methodologies that we've developed over the last seven years (some as open source and some as paid products) under the ICounts name. But we hope that our products will be surrounded by products from other consultants and service providers. Our goal is for the smarter-companies site to become a place of continuous learning about how to create smarter companies--and also a marketplace of solutions that help consultants and companies apply that learning ...".

This blogger is quick to recognise a fellow-enthusiast, and Mary certainly fits that description. He wishes Mary and this venture the best of luck.