Intellectual capital makes an organization worth more than its balance sheet value. For many years, intellectual capital and goodwill meant the same thing. Today, intellectual capital management is far broader. It seeks to explain how knowledge, collaboration, and process-engagement create decisions and actions that lead to cost allocations, productivity, and finally financial performance. It is strongly related to discipline of intangible management which extends intellectual capital management by updating the foundations of accounting, finance, economics, risk management, project management, and other traditional disciplines. Intangible management is governed by more than 40 international intangible standards. Capital has a number of related meanings in economics, finance and accounting. ...

Intellectual capital is a term with various definitions in different theories of economics. Accordingly its only truly neutral definition is as a debate over economic "intangibles". Ambiguous combinations of instructional capital and individual capital employed in productive enterprise are usually what is meant by the term, when it is used to actually refer to a capital asset whose yield is intellectual rights. Buyers bargain for good prices while sellers put forth their best front in Chichicastenango Market, Guatemala. ... Intangibles are qualities in an individual or group of individuals, especially those organized in an official group (e. ... Instructional capital is a term used in educational administration, to reflect capital resulting from investment in producing learning materials. ... Individual capital comprises inalienable or personal traits of persons, tied to their bodies and available only through their own free will, such as skill, creativity, enterprise, courage, capacity for moral example, non-communicable wisdom, invention or empathy, non-transferable personal trust and leadership. ... In accounting, a capital asset is an asset that is recorded as capital - that is, property that creates more property, e. ... Intellectual rights (from the French droits intellectuels) is a term sometimes used to refer to the legal protection afforded to owners of intellectual capital. ...

Such use is rare, however, and the term rarely or never appears in accounting proper - it refers to a debate, and to the assumed capital base that creates intellectual property, rather than an auditable style of capital. Accountancy (British English) or accounting (American English) is the process of maintaining, auditing, and processing financial information for business purposes. ... In law, intellectual property (IP) is an umbrella term for various legal entitlements which attach to certain types of information, ideas, or other intangibles in their expressed form. ...

Perhaps due to their industry focus, the term "intellectual capital" is employed mostly by theorists in information technology, innovation research, technology transfer and other fields concerned primarily with technology, standards, and venture capital. It was particularly prevalent in 1995-2000 as theories proliferated to explain the "dotcom boom" and high valuations. During this period it was often observed that computer code and programmers were bearing a substantial premium when combined in new unproven companies. It is hard to see how this differs from the tulip boom, however, when it would have been just as likely to assign a high value to the seemingly-magical combinations of tulip bulbs and, say, the pots they grew in. [[[[[[Information technology]]]]]] (IT) or Information and communication(s) technology (ICT) (also Infocomm, esp. ... Technology transfer is the process of developing practical applications for the results of scientific research. ... Venture capital is a general term to describe financing for startup and early stage businesses as well as businesses in turn around situations. ... Dot-com (also dotcom or redundantly dot. ... Pamphlet from the Dutch tulipomania, printed in 1637 Anonymous 17th-century watercolor of the Semper Augustus, the most famous bulb, which sold for a record price. ...

A transitional term

Because there is little agreement on how the intellectual is an asset, it is not clear if the term has a future in the field, or will be subsumed by other ideas, e.g. brand capital - social trust that exists only via owned instructions - an intangible.

Fortune magazine editor Thomas Stewart is the journalist of record on Intellectual Capital. He has been following its development since 1991. In his book this book, Intellectual Capital from 1997, Stewart introduces IC, offers a taxonomy for organizing it and successfully makes the case for managing it.

Dr. Nick Bontis has published several academic papers in the Journal of Intellectual Capital which follows Stewart's three main constructs that encompass the phenomenon of intellectual capital including human capital (the talent base of the employees), structural capital (the non-human storehouses of information) and relational capital (the knowledge embedded in business networks).

Baruch Lev documents "brand" as a new (seventh) form of capital. This seems to violate classical microeconomics basic model of the factors of production - and likely require major rethinking of microeconomics and political economy. Capital has a number of related meanings in economics, finance and accounting. ... Microeconomics (very small economics) is a social science which involves study of the economic distribution of production and income among individual consumers, firms, and industries. ... Factors of production are resources used in the production of goods and services in economics. ... Microeconomics (very small economics) is a social science which involves study of the economic distribution of production and income among individual consumers, firms, and industries. ... Political economy was the original term for the study of production, the acts of buying and selling, and their relationships to laws, customs and government. ...

The anti-globalization movement and green economists seem to broadly share a critique of "brand" documented by Naomi Klein in her book "No Logo" - although from an economics viewpoint their proposals for mandatory labelling schemes and a retrenchment of national sovereignty (so called "brand versus flag" or "brand versus label" debates) seem to validate Lev's assumption that brand does in fact add genuine value: a flag, or a brand, or a label, economically, all signify social trust, albeit with different procedures of complaint, recourse, and enforcement. Anti-WEF grafiti in Lausanne. ... Green economics loosely defines a theory of economics by which an economy is considered to be component of the ecosystem in which it resides. ... Naomi Klein Naomi Klein (born 1970) is a Canadian journalist, author and activist. ... Front cover of No Logo. ... Mandatory labelling of consumer products enables moral purchasing and avoidance of health problems like allergies. ... Sovereignty is the exclusive right to exercise supreme authority over a geographic region or group of people, such as a nation or a tribe. ...

Brand and intellectual capital debates are generally inseparable from larger debates on role of corporations and governments, and larger debates among anthropologists, primatologists and sociologists on imitation versus creativity in shaping human behavior. This article will avoid the larger political economy questions and deal with these only as required to explain the focus of intellectual capital theory, that being the relative valuation and balanced growth of: Also it can be a measure of how valuable a companies knowledge is. Anthropology (from the Greek word άνθρωπος, human or person) consists of the study of humanity (see genus Homo). ... Primatology is the study of primates. ... Social interactions of people and their consequences are the subject of sociology studies. ... Political economy was the original term for the study of production, the acts of buying and selling, and their relationships to laws, customs and government. ...

Individuals versus instructions

Focusing where the theories agree, there is no clear standard beyond the agreement that individuals and instructions contribute very different value in microeconomics. The question of the contribution of intellectual capital that combines the two in a process is more likely a matter of political economy, and difficult to separate from other issues of relative values of capital across a whole economy or society. Microeconomics (very small economics) is a social science which involves study of the economic distribution of production and income among individual consumers, firms, and industries. ... Political economy was the original term for the study of production, the acts of buying and selling, and their relationships to laws, customs and government. ... Capital has a number of related meanings in economics, finance and accounting. ...

This debate certainly did not begin with Baruch Lev and Naomi Klein - the roots of it can be seen as far back as John Stuart Mill and David Ricardo in the very origins of political economy. In the 20th century, the critiques of Ayn Rand and Richard Stallman are seen by some as representing a spectrum in which all instructional value is derived from individuals, or individuals are seen primarily as valued in terms of the instructional capital which they create - clearly political positions reflecting different attitudes to capitalism, rather than an analysis of how individuals and instructions actually interact. Or, some critics argue, how either affect society or nature. Naomi Klein Naomi Klein (born 1970) is a Canadian journalist, author and activist. ... John Stuart Mill (May 20, 1806 – May 8, 1873), an English philosopher and political economist, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. ... {{Infobox_Biography subject_name = David Ricardo | image_name = David_ricardo. ... Ayn Rand (IPA: , Ayn rhyming with fine; February 2 [O.S. January 20] 1905 – March 6, 1982), born Alisa Zinovevna Rosenbaum (Russian: ), was a Russian-American author and philosopher best known for developing the philosophy of Objectivism and for writing the novels We the Living, Anthem, The Fountainhead, and... Richard Matthew Stallman (frequently abbreviated to RMS) (born March 16, 1953) is the founder of the free software movement, the GNU Project, and the Free Software Foundation. ... For other uses, see Capitalism (disambiguation). ...

Does "intellect" exclude social capital?

The term "intellectual capital" seems almost exclusively used by theorists seeking ways to make systems or groups cooperate without relying on pre-existing social trust - research into measuring reputation, zero knowledge protocols, and authentication very often overlaps with the economic theories involved. Authentication is the act of establishing or confirming something or someone as authentic. ...

A broader (and far more standard and common) term, "human capital", assumes implicitly that social capital, which is (vaguely) inter-personal or cultural trust, must be involved in all such processes. Human capital is a way of defining and categorizing peoples skills and abilities as used in employment and otherwise contribute to the economy. ... Social capital is defined as the value that is created through the application of social networks during non-organizational time. ...

Interoperability focus

Excluding all informal "trust" from human productive activity, presumably, leaves only "intellectual" processes that combine individual creativity and widespread instructional imitation to create value for the enterprise and/or society, e.g. such processes as setting a standard for a programming language - requiring substantial innovation and experiment but ultimately serving no purpose unless the innovation is uniform and widespread enough to enable "interoperability". Interoperability is the ability of products, systems, or business processes to work together to accomplish a common task. ...

The best example may well be the Internet Protocol, or "IP", which was a simple networking protocol originally used to link US defense research sites together. The many individual contributions and extensions were disciplined by a deliberately distrusting process, rather like a court procedure, that included among other things ejecting vendors from commercial trade show space if their equipment failed to interoperate perfectly with that of all others. The Internet Protocol (IP) is a data-oriented protocol used for communicating data across a packet-switched internetwork. ...

Another example is the BIS which seeks to "hardwire the credit culture" of the global central banks to facilitate instant clearing of transactions - by standardizing the trust measures used by banks worldwide. BIS Headquarters in Basel The Bank for International Settlements (or BIS) is an international organization of central banks which exists to foster cooperation among central banks and other agencies in pursuit of monetary and financial stability. It carries out its work through subcommittees, the secretariats it hosts, and through its...

Meaningless without "social"?

However, it is hard to imagine how such enterprises could have succeeded without the social capital of the US government and NATO defense establishment itself - a common argument among theorists of human capital who hold that it isn't usually sensible to try to separate the role of trust in intellectual work. And who also often oppose the military-industrial complex that they see as funding such work and imposing its values on it. Social capital is defined as the value that is created through the application of social networks during non-organizational time. ... ... NATO 2002 Summit in Prague The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, the Atlantic Alliance or the Western Alliance, is an international organisation for collective security established in 1949, in support of the North Atlantic Treaty signed in Washington, DC, on 4 April 1949. ... Human capital is a way of defining and categorizing peoples skills and abilities as used in employment and otherwise contribute to the economy. ... The term military-industrial complex usually refers to the combination of the U.S. armed forces, arms industry and associated political and commercial interests, which grew rapidly in scale and influence in the wake of World War II, although it can also be used to describe any such relationship of...

It is sometimes argued that theorists of intellectual capital, by assuming individual and instructional contributions are inseparable or both equally valuable or not reliant on social trust at all but rather vague "intellect", are deliberately forcing their political economy to conform to ideals of neoclassical economics or even libertarian parties. Denying creative contributions of labor has however been a common theme in economics - treating labor as one of three factors of production was rejected by Marx who reframed them (minus labor) as his "means of production". Political economy was the original term for the study of production, the acts of buying and selling, and their relationships to laws, customs and government. ... Neoclassical economics refers to a general approach (a metatheory) to economics based on supply and demand which depends on individuals (or any economic agent) operating rationally, each seeking to maximize their individual utility or profit by making choices based on available information. ... Buyers bargain for good prices while sellers put forth their best front in Chichicastenango Market, Guatemala. ... Factors of production are resources used in the production of goods and services in economics. ... The means of production are physical, non-human, inputs used in production. ...

Subordinates persons and nature?

Other objections are heard in the anti-globalization movement which objects to, among other things, global use of patent instruments to "protect" instructional capital at the expense of individual capital (persons) or natural capital (ecologies) - which remain fixed in one nation each. Vandana Shiva's popular account of this process gave rise to the term "biopiracy" to describe corporate patents on plants long used by indigenous peoples prior to colonization. She describes the process of colonial "discovery" as applying to land, to labor, and even to knowledge. Anti-WEF grafiti in Lausanne. ... A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a person for a fixed period of time in exchange for the regulated, public disclosure of certain details of a device, method, process or composition of matter (substance) (known as an invention) which is new, inventive, and... Instructional capital is a term used in educational administration, to reflect capital resulting from investment in producing learning materials. ... Individual capital comprises inalienable or personal traits of persons, tied to their bodies and available only through their own free will, such as skill, creativity, enterprise, courage, capacity for moral example, non-communicable wisdom, invention or empathy, non-transferable personal trust and leadership. ... Natural capital is a metaphor for the mineral, plant, and animal formations of the Earths biosphere when viewed as a means of production of oxygen, water filter, erosion preventer, or provider of other natural services. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Biopiracy refers to the privatization and unauthorized use of biological resources by entities (including corporations, universities and governments) outside of a country which has pre-existing knowledge. ... The term has no universal, standard or fixed definition. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Colonialism. ...

Another critique by meme theorist Liane Gabora argues that creativity is vastly underestimated, and imitation vastly overestimated, in most of our economics. In line with feminist economists like Marilyn Waring, Gabora notes that human mothers are immensely creative in raising children, and human artists often invent new technologies while pursuing no clear goal - but neither activity is measured. While this validates the idea that social trust can be minimal in some such processes, it casts doubt upon the notion that economic activity can ever be understood without a deeper understanding of creativity and how it expresses itself economically as individual capital. The term meme (IPA: ) was used in 1976 by Richard Dawkins to mean a replicator of cultural information which one mind transmits (verbally or by demonstration) to another mind. ... Liane Gabora is a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia - Okanagan. ... Buyers bargain for good prices while sellers put forth their best front in Chichicastenango Market, Guatemala. ... Feminist economics is not a single study but more a set of observations by feminist ethicists, economists, political scientists and systems scientists, that womens traditional work (e. ... Marilyn Waring (born 1952) is a renowned New Zealand feminist, an activist for female human rights, an author and an academic. ... Creative (or creativeness) is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts. ... Individual capital comprises inalienable or personal traits of persons, tied to their bodies and available only through their own free will, such as skill, creativity, enterprise, courage, capacity for moral example, non-communicable wisdom, invention or empathy, non-transferable personal trust and leadership. ...

Is "intellectual property" valid?

Although the theory came long after the instruments, as with all other economics, there are instruments of patent and copyright protection in all countries of the world, and they are increasingly uniform. Buyers bargain for good prices while sellers put forth their best front in Chichicastenango Market, Guatemala. ... A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a person for a fixed period of time in exchange for the regulated, public disclosure of certain details of a device, method, process or composition of matter (substance) (known as an invention) which is new, inventive, and... Legal Disclaimer: this page contains legal information for reference and education, but it is not legal advice–the application of law to an individuals specific circumstances. ...

There is a substantial literature of intellectual property law and how these protections and instruments further or inhibit productive enterprise. In law, particularly in common law jurisdictions, intellectual property is a form of legal entitlement which allows its holder to control the use of certain intangible ideas and expressions. ...

Controversy seems to surround the question of whether instruments designed primarily to protect rights in individual creativity, e.g. copyright, are appropriate as a means to protect broader shared instructions, e.g. software. Also, whether instruments designed primarily to protect rights in inventions, e.g. patent, can reasonably describe social constructions such as software. Legal Disclaimer: this page contains legal information for reference and education, but it is not legal advice–the application of law to an individuals specific circumstances. ... Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ... A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a person for a fixed period of time in exchange for the regulated, public disclosure of certain details of a device, method, process or composition of matter (substance) (known as an invention) which is new, inventive, and... Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ...

Liberal economists are strong critics of what they call [exclusivity rights].

Brand as more than instructional, individual, and social value

Another debate focuses on the role of trademark and brand name to demark reliable instructions versus membership in a user community - and who and how can someone own the rights to a common phrase or a community's name. A trademark or trade mark[1] is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by a business to uniquely identify itself and its products and services to consumers, and to distinguish the business and its products or services from those of other businesses. ... This article is about brands in marketing. ...

Baruch Lev holds that neither the idea of instructional capital nor individual capital nor social capital as understood in sociology sufficiently describes the trust placed by consumers or the standards upheld by the enterprise - that a distinction and separate "brand capital" exists. Instructional capital is a term used in educational administration, to reflect capital resulting from investment in producing learning materials. ... Individual capital comprises inalienable or personal traits of persons, tied to their bodies and available only through their own free will, such as skill, creativity, enterprise, courage, capacity for moral example, non-communicable wisdom, invention or empathy, non-transferable personal trust and leadership. ... Social capital is defined as the value that is created through the application of social networks during non-organizational time. ... Social interactions of people and their consequences are the subject of sociology studies. ...

Of course, who creates this value, who owns it, and who is liable for harms it does, is the core of the "label versus brand versus flag" policy debate.

Brand as tulip; brand as a deadly sin

It is quite difficult to separate the analysis from the advocacy on this topic, and from analysis of other topics such as ethical investing or moral purchasing, which inherently assume that certain responsibilities accrue to the consumer, the direct supplier, indirect suppliers, or others involved in the regulatory, inspection, enforcement and protection process. Ethical investing, also known as Socially responsible investing or SRI attempts to ensure that invested funds are not used to violate the investors most basic moral values or ethical codes. ... Ethical consumerism is the practice of boycotting products which a consumer believes to be associated with unnecessary exploitation or other unethical behaviour. ...

Many critics of pro-"brand" views hold that "brand" is merely an aspect of firm-specific human capital, specifically, firm-specific social capital, and that it cannot be a means of production nor an effective means of protection since it often disappears very quickly. They point to such cases of sudden brand name devaluation, e.g. the "dotcom boom", Enron and Arthur Andersen in late 2001 and early 2002, and far earlier phenomena such as the Dutch Tulip Boom, as evidence that enterprises whose financial market valuations exceed the actual instructional reliability, individual creativity, and social trust combinations vested in the firm itself, are quickly dragged back down to reasonable valuations based on more traditional criteria associated with financial and infrastructural holdings. Individual capital comprises inalienable or personal traits of persons, tied to their bodies and available only through their own free will, such as skill, creativity, enterprise, courage, capacity for moral example, non-communicable wisdom, invention or empathy, non-transferable personal trust and leadership. ... The means of production are physical, non-human, inputs used in production. ... A means of protection is some contract or guarantee of security for body or property. ... Dot-com (also dotcom or redundantly dot. ... Enron Corporation is an energy company based in Houston, Texas. ... This article or section seems not to be written in the formal tone expected of an encyclopedia entry. ...

If this view is correct, it has major implications - brand becomes, as Naomi Klein claims, "No Logo", but simply a trigger for "fear" or "lust" or "greed" or other sins, with no lasting persistent value. Brand may not even validate that it represents responsible individuals, reliable instructions, and trust in a social structure in which they all cooperate. In effect, mandatory labeling could do everything that a brand could do, and corporations may be, as David Korten claims, mere "responsibility evasion mechanisms". Naomi Klein Naomi Klein (born 1970) is a Canadian journalist, author and activist. ... Front cover of No Logo. ... The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices or cardinal sins, are a classification of vices used in early Christian teachings to educate and protect followers from basic human instincts. ... Mandatory labelling of consumer products enables moral purchasing and avoidance of health problems like allergies. ... Dr. David C. Korten is an author and leader within the anti-globalization movement. ...

Brand, flag, label or fear?

All of these positions seem to validate the basic analysis that some kind of intellectual value (beyond the emotional assurances described in social capital theory) accrues to some tag, be it a brand, a flag, or a label. Indeed there is evidence that the three may be interchangeable economically, and merely provide a more specific or tangible assurance to the purchaser: Social capital is defined as the value that is created through the application of social networks during non-organizational time. ...

Proponents of anti-"brand" views often see mandatory labeling backed by national sovereignty (label and flag, with "no logo") as a way to replace or drastically reduce the trust placed in corporate brand names. Most of the strongest opponents of corporate personhood are also proponents of such mandatory labeling schemes, e.g. in textiles, and on organic foods. They have had substantial success labeling genetic modification, especially in the EU, and spawned the fields of biosafety and (along with more focused nonproliferation and biological warfare concerns) the newer field of biosecurity. Mandatory labelling of consumer products enables moral purchasing and avoidance of health problems like allergies. ... Sovereignty is the exclusive right to exercise supreme authority over a geographic region or group of people, such as a nation or a tribe. ... A trademark or trade mark[1] is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by a business to uniquely identify itself and its products and services to consumers, and to distinguish the business and its products or services from those of other businesses. ... Corporate personhood is a term used to describe the legal fiction used within United States law that a corporation has a limited number or subset of the same constitutional rights as a human being. ... Mandatory labelling of consumer products enables moral purchasing and avoidance of health problems like allergies. ... Genetic engineering, genetic modification (GM), and gene splicing (once in widespread use but now deprecated) are terms for the process of manipulating genes in an organism, usually outside of the organisms normal reproductive process. ... Biosafety: prevention of large-scale loss of biological integrity, focusing both on ecology and human health. ... Nuclear proliferation is the spread from nation to nation of nuclear technology, including nuclear power plants but especially nuclear weapons. ... Biological warfare, also known as germ warfare, is the use of any organism (bacteria, virus or other disease-causing organism) or toxin found in nature, as a weapon of war. ... A biosecurity guarantee attempts to ensure that ecologies sustaining either people or animals are maintained. ...

The nonproliferation debate arises between promoting and inhibiting certain types of trade in intellect - most notably those "dual-use technologies" that can both add and seriously subtract economic value, when expressed in tools or as weapons. These concerns were highlighted when US President G. W. Bush in 2001 rejected the Biological Weapons Convention - in part to satisfy biotechnology corporations who feared that arms control inspectors would potentially steal "intellectual property". Nuclear proliferation is the spread from nation to nation of nuclear technology, including nuclear power plants but especially nuclear weapons. ... Dual-use is a term often used in politics and diplomacy to refer to technology which can be used for both peaceful and military aims, usually in regard to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. ... George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is the 43rd and current President of the United States and a former governor of Texas. ... Biological Weapons Convention Opened for signature April 10, 1972 at Moscow, Washington and London Entered into force March 26, 1975 Conditions for entry into force ??? Parties ??? The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction (usually referred to... The structure of insulin Biotechnology is a technology based on biology, especially when used in agriculture, food science, and medicine. ...

The brand, flag, label debate may need to be reframed in terms of simple fear: where did it come from? Will it work? Who's got another one?

Brand as asset

Whether flags, brands, labels or simple fear dominate economic decisions, it seems that the underlying theories of intellectual capital and of human capital don't explain them. When attached to "capital" as prefixes, the terms "intellectual", "knowledge" and "human" often conceal more than their use can reveal. Thus the terms intellectual capital, knowledge capital and human capital more properly describe debates, not assets, as they never appear on a balance sheet. They produce neat abstractions but so far poorly explain what actually occurs in the biologically real world: individuals buying in a social setting based on instructions. Human capital is a way of defining and categorizing peoples skills and abilities as used in employment and otherwise contribute to the economy. ...

So far, the more specific terms "individual", instructional" and "social" from human development theory, have been preferred in Wikipedia. In part this is because these terms have definitions that arise from academic categories and practices rather than faddish marketing or management theories. There are standards for assigning value to these, e.g. the UN Human Development Index which literally ranks flags (of countries) for quality of life. Individual capital comprises inalienable or personal traits of persons, tied to their bodies and available only through their own free will, such as skill, creativity, enterprise, courage, capacity for moral example, non-communicable wisdom, invention or empathy, non-transferable personal trust and leadership. ... Instructional capital is a term used in educational administration, to reflect capital resulting from investment in producing learning materials. ... Social capital is defined as the value that is created through the application of social networks during non-organizational time. ... Human development theory is an economic theory that merges older ideas from ecological economics, sustainable development, welfare economics, and feminist economics. ... Wikipedia (IPA: , , or ) is an international Web-based cooperative free-content encyclopedia. ... The UN Human Development Index (HDI) measures poverty, literacy, education, life expectancy, and other factors. ... The well-being or quality of life of a population is an important concern in economics and political science. ...

Extending such standards to labels (via mandatory labelling) and applying them positively in brand management, e.g. positioning a brand for appeal to an ethical minority, is increasingly common. Projects by Consumerium and AdBusters seek to make comprehensive outcomes more important in buying decisions. This in turn is part of a trend towards more moral purchasing. Mandatory labelling of consumer products enables moral purchasing and avoidance of health problems like allergies. ... The discipline of brand management was started at Procter & Gamble as a result of a famous memo by Neil H. McElroy. ... Adbusters is a political magazine, founded by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz that is published in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada by the Media Foundation. ... Ethical consumerism is the practice of boycotting products which a consumer believes to be associated with unnecessary exploitation or other unethical behaviour. ...

When viewed as an asset, then, a brand is simple social capital that may have an increasing amount of instructional capital attached to satisfy an ever-rising demand for more information about product origin, production and distribution. Social capital is defined as the value that is created through the application of social networks during non-organizational time. ... Instructional capital is a term used in educational administration, to reflect capital resulting from investment in producing learning materials. ...

References

• Stewart, T. A. (1999), Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations, Currency/Doubleday, New York, NY.
• Stewart, T. A. (2001), The Wealth of Knowledge Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-First Century Organization, Nicholas Brealey, London.
• Sveiby, K. E. (1997), The New Organizational Wealth: Managing & Measuring Knowledge-Based Assets, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco.

See also

• Corporate personhood
• Human capital
• Intangible assets
• Intellectual property law
• KM concepts
• Knowledge Management
• Nonproliferation
• Software patents
• Technology transfer

Corporate personhood is a term used to describe the legal fiction used within United States law that a corporation has a limited number or subset of the same constitutional rights as a human being. ... Human capital is a way of defining and categorizing peoples skills and abilities as used in employment and otherwise contribute to the economy. ... Intangible assets are defined as assets that are not physical in nature. ... In law, particularly in common law jurisdictions, intellectual property is a form of legal entitlement which allows its holder to control the use of certain intangible ideas and expressions. ... Key Knowledge Management Concepts Knowledge management discourse has adopted, invented and refined concepts from a wide range of disciplines and practices. ... Knowledge management (KM) may refer[1] to the ways organizations gather, manage, and use the knowledge that they acquire. ... Nuclear proliferation is the spread from nation to nation of nuclear technology, including nuclear power plants but especially nuclear weapons. ... Software patents are a type of intellectual property and one of many legal aspects of computing. ... Technology transfer is the process of developing practical applications for the results of scientific research. ...

External links

• ICPortal - IC Portal: A collaborative effort to build a knowledge base in the area of intellectual capital and intangible assets.
• Dr. Bontis - Dr. Nick Bontis: Keynote Speaker and Academic Researcher
• "Dr. Nick Bontis IC research page"
• "The Value of Knowledge Capital" - Strassmann
• nonproliferation of research
• Baruch Lev, "Intangibles: Management, Measurements, and Reporting", 2001
• Research on Intellectual Capital and Knowledge Economy - by Dr. Daniel G. Andriessen
• Intellectual Capital directory (some written in Dutch)

• Open Source KM Education, Consulting Methodology, Processes, Tools and Techniques