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Business Rx: Building intellectual capital

18.05.12

Invest in gathering, documenting and coding of your intellectual assets . For many companies, the know-how, show-how, processes, systems and technical knowledge that drives their success often is undocumented and poorly managed. Internal best practices are shared over a water cooler and not captured and codified in an operations manual or training program. There also seems to be greater “institutional memory” over worst practices and failures than our best practices and successes. Don’t let knowledge leave the premises when workers exit the building. Some of it never returns.

Don’t select projects to implement based on personal agendas . As Oliver Schlake, a professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, has said, “Pet projects are resource-draining cats with nine lives. They are virtually impossible to shut down and keep reappearing at the doorstep.” The process must be objective and aligned with overall business strategy in order to fully optimize the innovation portfolio. Put processes in place to create impartial judges and juries who apply objective and well-published criteria, screens and filters to determine which projects go to the next level, which are put on the back burner, which will be developed externally and which should be discarded.

Source: Washington Post