Innovation and Financial Markets

2How to Develop the Innovative Capacity of Companies

2.1. Introduction

In the economic world, it is common to say that a start-up innovates once, when it is born, and that a company innovates as many times as necessary to live, prosper, survive, and to sometimes even be reborn.

Innovation is therefore essential. This goes without saying for a start-up, but for a mature company this implies that it must constantly carry out two activities, which are certainly intertwined, but have different objectives:

• – the first activity is dedicated to its social mission as described in its statutes and which monopolizes most of its resources and time;
• – the second activity is devoted to the function of “re-creation”, i.e. innovation. As such, the assets required are the same as those used for start-ups.

Intangible assets, which can vary from one company to another, are a fundamental source of sustainable value creation (Kaplan and Norton 2004).

In organizational terms, the generation of intangible assets is a holistic approach based on three main and complementary pillars (Yitmen 2011):

• – Human capital: “The human capacity of an organization that helps solve business problems” (Bontis 2001). Employees are assets, but they are mobile and cannot be detained by organizations. This category therefore encompasses the efficiency with which an organization uses its human resources (Bontis 2001).
• – Internal or structural capital: includes all the non-human knowledge pools of organizations that ...