Comprehensive Intellectual Capital Management: Step-By-Step

Chapter 4. The Comprehensive Intellectual Capital Management (CICM) Approach

THE STAGES OF BUSINESS MANAGEMENT AND THE CICM APPROACH

To develop ICM as a business management approach for the IC-intensive organization, it is important to understand the business cycle of IC and to tie it to the elementary stages (or functions) of business management. These include:

• Managing resources

• Managing the production process

• Maximizing value to stakeholders (be it defined in terms of bottom line, meeting a mission, or simply success)

These stages (or functions) are the basis of business management in every organization. The first stage ensures having the raw resources for operation or production, while the second stage converts these resources through various processes into valuable assets, and the last stage leverages this value to maximize return to stakeholders. In an economy where 80 percent of business value is made of IC, ICM should be engrained at each of these stages. That is the gist of the CICM approach.

The business cycle of IC follows the same stages as those enumerated above. Under this business cycle, IC progresses from being a resource with a potential value to an asset with a perceived value, to becoming a product with a market value. As a resource, the value of IC is latent; hence, the task of management at this stage is to create value from intellectual resources. Once value is realized, it then can be extracted through business processes where the intellectual resource is transformed ...