Discussions about a company’s intangible assets rarely prompt management teams’ pulse to race to the point they attach higher (strategic) priorities to engaging, utilizing, and building (more) value in their company’s intangibles.
A necessary requisite today to company sustainability and success lies in management team’s ability and determination to recognize, mobilize, and utilize frequently overlooked intangible assets.
In today’s enterprise risk management equation, many board members bring their own perspectives and experiences regarding the stewardship, oversight, and management of risk which makes it difficult to find a common context to frame-address the broad spectrum of assymetric risks that routinely confront businesses today.
Because intangible assets and intellectual property (IP) are frequently key elements in mergers and acquisitions, its essential to ensure that due diligence fully assesses the status, stability, fragility, and defensibility of those assets to determine if control, use, ownership, and value can be sustained (practically and legally) post transaction.
The increasingly essential (fiduciary) responsibility for managing a company’s reputation risk, should not emulate the conventional Hollywood-style publicist or public relations model especially in light of the growing reality that ‘reputational risks’ are internet assymetric!
Building and promoting knowledge and intellectual capital in SME’s represents a prudent and much needed exercise for management teams.