It’s incumbent on Chief Security Officers (aka corporate directors of security) to acquire familiarity with their company’s intangible assets to meet the asset protection and security challenges presented by today’s ever growing knowledge-based economies.
Management teams, boards, directors and officers, and investors; the tipping point for utilizing – exploiting intangible assets has arrived! It’s contagious, its the reality that little causes can have a big effect in companies, and positive change can happen, perhaps not gradually, but at one dramatic moment!
In ‘knowledge-based’ economies, wherein 65+% of most company’s value lies in intangible assets, perpetuating the notion that intangible assets can be singularly defined as ‘goodwill’ certainly does not reflect the depth, breadth, and/or contributions intangibles consistently make to company’s.
The value of most company’s intangible asset far exceeds the value of their tangible assets. This economic fact – business reality clearly establishes the need for company management teams to develop in-house expertise and best practices regarding the utilization of intangible assets.
Will companies find themselves in a predicament again, not unlike the y2k period, in which their internally developed and proprietary intellectual capital (know how) becomes hollow, i.e., lacks the necessary depth, organizational framework, and infrastructure to quickly and effectively respond to on-the-horizon challenges, risks, and threats.
Management teams must recognize that companies produce knowledge, and that knowledge (information) is a commodity that warrants clearly defined ownership rights, and effective safeguards to sustain its control, use, and monitor its value (indeterminately).
Knowledge has become the primary economic muscle of the knowledge-based economies and nearly all of the world’s most innovative, successful, and wealthy companies are those that wield their knowledge (information) effectively.