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The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) is one of the best think tanks in Washington because they study how innovation drives economic growth. However, the ITIF largely ignores how intangible capital drives innovation and economic growth. In their recent report,

Contributors and Detractors:Ranking Countries’ Impact on Global Innovation,

https://itif.org/publications/2016/01/20/contributors-and-detractors-ranking-countries%E2%80%99-impact-global-innovation

http://www2.itif.org/2016-contributors-and-detractors.pdf

they use an obsolete model of policy that almost completely ignores both intangible capital as a driver of innovation AND the methodology of innovation management as a driver of innovation.

The report focuses on measuring global competitiveness of innovation in countries with a model of innovation that is driven almost entirely by the traditional factors of economic growth such as deregulation to achieve free markets and global trade, availability of capital, protection of intellectual property, and tax incentives for funding R&D. The report considers "human capital" as mainly general higher education produced at universities. 

The ITIF is promoting an obsolete policy for competitive innovation that is like promoting an obsolete policy for competitive manufacturing that focuses mainly on capital investments in factories (land and buildings) and the unregulated cost of labor and labor conditions while ignoring the methodology of manufacturing management and engineering based on smart people with specific knowledge required to manage and operate modern assembly lines enabled by flexibility in sequence and the interchangeability of parts, assisted by Frederick Taylor's scientific management, expert knowledge of and application of quality management based on statistics, resulting in the competitiveness enabled by the principles and practices of a system of lean production and the relationships in supply chain management to achieve just-in-time, reduced inventory and maximized flow while controlling high standards of quality.

And of course, business success for growth in manufacturing requires the right products to be manufactured with validated market demand and value resulting from competitive innovation management with competitive strategy, organization, marketing, R&D, finance and HR based on tangible and intangible capital.

There were people from 40 countries who attended International Conference on Intellectual Capital and Knowledge Management (ICICKM) in DC last week. As always, it was great to see old friends from our community.

Our contingent included Xiaomi An, LinLin Cai, Paul Okeke, Dan Paulin and Paul Tolson who all presented great papers. Jon Low and Debra Amidon gave the keynotes. And the current, past and future co-chairs of ICICKM were all present: Annie Green, Vincent Ribiere and John Dumay. Our ICountants Melanie Sutton, Jodie Cohen-Tanugi and I were there carrying the ICounting flag (Melanie gave an amazing presentation that we filmed and will share later). [if I missed anyone, please let me know and I'll get you in the list!]

The thing that I always come away from these events with, especially so this year, is the thought that there are so many people all trying to tackle the same challenges all across the globe. These occasional conferences are good. But to really change the world, we need to turn it into a more continuous conversation (don’t ask how many times I asked people to post their work to our community:)

Some papers that caught my eye:

• IC of universities (especially because we have a Graphs project starting with a university in November)
• A paper about Collective Intelligence (CI instead of IC!) that examined the workings of three on-line citizen communities in Lithuania—glad to see this line of thinking in the IC world.
• An individual-centred model of intellectual capital
• And many more that all continue to contribute to the overall conversation about IC.

I had a number of great conversations with John Dumay about his plans for next year’s conference in Sydney. He plans to encourage more practitioner cases and Melanie Sutton’s great presentation made it clear that we practitioners bring a lot to the discussion.

The best thing about these conferences is that I return to my work energized that we are a much bigger movement than any of us (or anyone else) realizes. Let’s keep working!!

(apology to readers and note to self: you’re carrying around several devices with cameras. please take pictures next time)