Member Blogs

For many years I have had a great interest (some would say obsession!) about the role of intangible capital in the growth and competitiveness of companies. With the help of my colleagues, our clients and our broad network, we worked to develop  tools and methodologies to support this thinking. And we created this web community to share our learnings because we felt strongly that one person or one company could never have all the answers. Until now, the community was known as the IC Knowledge Center. Today, I am announcing a new future for our community with the re-launching of the site as smarter-companies. 

This new site will be designed around our existing community. To date, we have attracted an international audience. 60% of you are consultants. 20% are academics (many of whom also consult). The remainder includes attorneys, companies, non-profits, governments and solutions providers. Your areas of specialization include intellectual/intangible capital, knowledge management, human capital, innovation, finance, information technology, marketing, performance management and intellectual property.

In short, our community is like a map of the intangible capital of the organizations we serve. Yet the potential of our community’s IC, like that of many organizations, has not been fully developed. That’s why we’ve made the decision to re-name the community and create a business model around it.

Going forward, at smarter-companies, we will be offering the products and methodologies that we’ve developed over the last seven years (some as open source and some as paid products) under the ICounts name. But we hope that our products will be surrounded by products from other consultants and service providers. Our goal is for the smarter-companies site to become a place of continuous learning about how to create smarter companies—and also a marketplace of solutions that help consultants and companies apply that learning.

As we enter 2013, allow me to share my belief in a bright future. The ultimate message of intangible capital is that we share collective knowledge, much of it untapped, that has the potential to conquer the challenges facing the world and create profitable, sustainable businesses fueled by the power of people, communities and social technologies.

I hope you will join us on this journey,  Mary Adams