Intellectual capital

Metaphase Metaphase offers a Web-centric information infrastructure that harnesses its customers intellectual capital to drive product innovation and manage the complete product life cycle. 

Most firms boast beautiful buildings. This is certainly true of the buildings within the campus-like facilities at Infosys s headquarters near Bangalore, India. But, it would be a mistake to look just at Infosys s well-designed buildings. As one enters the company s campus, it is obvious that Infosys is also continually and systematically building its intellectual capital. 

In firms such as Infosys, intellectual capital lies distributed among employees who can determine the extent and quality of their intellectual contributions. As Infosys s chairman pointed out, the firm s intellectual assets walk out of the door every evening and it is the management s responsibility to ensure that they return the next morning. 

Fixed assets are items that have a relatively long life such as land, buildings, and manufacturing equipment. The sum of these items is the total proper, plant, and equipment. From this total, accumulated depreciation is subtracted and the result is net property and equipment. Last, an item referred to as intangibles includes a variety of items such as patents, hcenses, intellectual capital, and goodwill. Intangibles are difficult to evaluate since they have no physicm existence e.g., goodwill is the value of the company s name and reputation. The sum of the total current assets, net proper, and intan tes is the total assets. 

The early center of alchemy was the intellectual capital of ancient Greece, Alexandria. Very little remains of the original alchemical manuscripts from ancient Greece. The rise of Christianity and concerns about disrupting the economy eventually led the Roman Emperor Diocletian to... 

As much of the more relevant scientific literature will be referenced in the subsequent papers, it is worthwhile examining the associated patent literature on peptide self-assembly. Patents are pursued to protect intellectual capital with the aim of developing science and technology into a business proposition. In the last 5 years, about 100 patents have been granted in the peptide self-assembly field with focus on applications in the medical and pharmaceutical markets. 

In the early 1990s Dow Chemical considered that it was not exploiting to the full extent its intellectual capital, generated over many years requiring a high-level of expenditure [C-36]. So it set up a small team to examine how it might re-engineer its... 

Rather than announce some grand plan to manage intellectual capital, the group decided to be make changes of more evolutionary nature and not try to be too revolutionary. So they started with patents, an asset with which many people in the company were familiar. 

Loh, R.R. Polasky, M.E. Delaviz, Y. et al. Polystyrene foam containing a modifier-free nanoclay and having improved fire protection performance, PCT Patent Application WO/2007/030719, assigned to Owens Coming Intellectual Capital, 2007. 

The CNR-Novartis arrangement has a number of features that are novel both for the UC Berkeley and for public universities generally in the United States. Some features could result in a substantially increased flow of intellectual capital from the corporation to the research programs of a department s faculty and potentially enrich the economic returns to the campus for research done there. Other features— the relative scale and the relative exclusivity and duration— together seem worrisome to the academic community of UC Berkeley. These concerns are summarized below. They arose from extensive faculty discussions. 

Solid wastes and intellectual capital Employee compensation Workplace diversity... 

Figure 11 shows a simplified view of social, environmental, and economic systems. The economic system draws on materials and energy resources from the environment, and on labor and intellectual capital from society. The economic system generates a diversity of goods and services for society s benefit, but at... 

Intellectual capital must be recognized as the only viable property in the Knowledge Age. In this fast-paced era, the only competitive advantage — the only source of profitability and productivity any organization has — comes from robust, incremental innovations from individuals, both inside companies and in their partner organizations. 

Business leaders must learn to recognize, respect and employ in broad measure, the value of an enterprise s most intangible assets — intellectual capital. As Albert Einstein put it, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. More intuitive measures should be employed. Chemical engineers need to accommodate what counts, internally by rewarding talented engineers... 

The most successful companies have already realized the returns on investment of intellectual capital, and the ongoing challenge of inspiring an environment that brings out the individual s best. Fostering a culture that ties productivity to the human spirit, is certain to grow a team that has practically no limits. 

The rapid shift to a global gas market is not a certainty. It depends enormously on creating the context in which investors will have confidence to deploy vast sums of financial and intellectual capital it requires finding solutions to the adverse social and political consequences of developing natural resources in countries where governance is weak and it assumes a continued pull from the growing world electricity sector. 

First, the vision for gas depends enormously on investor confidence and the supply of vast sums of financial and intellectual capital. A plethora of studies has confirmed that world gas resources are abundant, but many of those resources are not in countries that have traditionally been attractive for private investors. The capital-intensive nature of gas and the long payback periods typical of gas projects - 15 to 20 years or longer for some of the most complex projects - makes investors especially wary. Useful reserves are those where large amounts of gas combine with a political and governance system that is conducive to such projects. Where those conditions do not exist - such as in Iran and possibly in Russia - large amounts of gas will be left in the ground. 

Stewart, T. A., Intellectual Capital The New Wealth of Organizations, Doubleday, New York, 1997. Thomas, R. J., New Product Development Managing and Forecasting for Strategic Success, John WUey Sons, New York, 1993. 

Brooking, A. (1996), Intellectual Capital Core Asset for the Third Millennium Enterprise, Thompson Business Press, London. 

Edvinsson, L., and Malone, M. S. (1997), Intellectual Capital Realizing your Company s True Value by Finding Its Hidden Brainpower, HarperCollins, New York. 

Klein, D. A., Ed. (1998), The Strategic Management of Intellectual Capital, Butterworth-Heineman, Boston. 

Roos, J., Roos, G., Edvinsson, L., and Dragonetti, N. C. (1998), Intellectual Capital Navigating in the New Business Landscape, New York University Press, New York. 

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