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!

Investors interest for NPSP Composieten BV relates to IC Rating Report.

NPSP Composieten BV is a composites manufacturer in the Netherlands. In a €800 million domestic market with about 200 companies, NPSP Composieten BV is market leader in manufacturing composites using 85% bio based materials. This is what they call Nature Based Composites: the NABASCO brand they have developed over the last 5 years. Learn more at: http://www.npsp.nl/?IDL=2 

Almost two years ago, i2c delivered an Intellectual Capital Rating™ report based on stakeholder interviews (the extended method developed by Leif Edvinsson and ICAB, Sweden). This report stated the intellectual capital value on NPSP BV focussing on the efficiencies, renewal and risks.

The overall Intellectual Capital score of NPSP Composieten BV was satisfactory, even very good at IP and relational capital. Their main challenge was about experience in the Management Team, protecting their IP and moving towards new branches such as construction through marketing outside their common client groups.

In the Netherlands, today, commercial & investments banks, and even investments funds are criticized of lacking any initiative to support innovative technical and manufacturing companies. But NPSP Composieten BV (Financial Daily, Hans de Jongh, March 16^th 2012) found new investors. Time to find out what precisely happened.  

Wanting to share the success, CEO Willem Bottger, explained. The IC Rating report was part of the complete set of due diligence files. But the report got the attention, and convinced a traditional bank, a business angel and a private equity investor who decided on an investment of 50% of the NPSP Composieten BV turnover of 2011. During the research period of this investment group, questions about the IC report where unfolding realistic growth and development issues that the management team had intervened upon since i2c research team had presented it. Every single risk and learning had been given follow-up. The reliability of the IC report was even after such a long time not questioned, the advantage for the investors with this kind of reporting was clear. As NPSP Composieten BV will grow the coming years, they plan to do a new IC Rating Research when turnover has doubled.