Member Blogs

On Friday, I’m going to be with our ICountant partners in Amsterdam at IPR Plaza and i2c to facilitate a workshop for their communities. The focus of the workshop is creating superstar companies and we’ll use a couple of our open source ICounts tools to give the participants a first-hand lesson in ICounting.

Our partners picked two local companies to use in the exercises: Heineken and Akzo.Nobel. These are great examples because they are both companies that on the surface appear to be traditional, industrial companies. So it will be fun to explore with the participants how important intangibles are to the future of these companies.

As part of my prep work, I was poking around both companies’ websites. And I happened upon this page on the Heineken website. It’s great background even if you’re not going to be there…

It’s clear from this that Heineken, despite having an enormous number of tangible assets (including breweries and distribution networks around the world), is focusing its business priorities on people, processes, partners and purpose—all intangibles. How important are these intangibles relative to its tangibles? I’ll let you know what the group decides when we do an ICounts Index of the company (you can do one too with our on-line tool).

Then the really interesting part will be the next step when we do an ICounts Inventory for each company where we make lists of the key intangibles in each category. If you’re in Amsterdam on Friday, stop by. If not, check for the follow up here—or host your own ICounts party somewhere else and let us know about it!