Intellectual Assets Management

Intellectual Assets Management
              

Intellectual Assets are the codified (documented) knowledge of companies and organisations. Sometimes Intellectual Assets are referred to as the “Structural Capital” of companies. Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) broadly refers to the “Value Extraction” process of ICM practice. The Scottish Intellectual Assets Centre describes IAM as “the process of both capturing and managing knowledge, and fully exploiting it for commercial gain.” In Japan, the ICM practice is known as Intellectual Asset based Management http://www.meti.go.jp/policy/intellectual_assets/english.html

ICM practitioners in Asia Pacific should also take note of a term “IP Asset Management and Utilization”, as an initiative that will be driven by the Intellectual Property Rights Experts’ Group of the APEC Committee on Trade and Investment.

The first IC Centre in Asia is the IP Academy of Singapore acting in co-operation with several Government Business Development agencies. Founding members of this very important IC Centre in Asia http://www.ipacademy.com.sg/ probably felt that Intellectual Property ought to be the starting point when the IP Academy of Singapore was founded in 2003 however in recent years the Academy has included elements of IAM. The Scottish IA Centre http://www.ia-centre.org.uk/ ( launched in November 2004) felt that it should be focusing on Intellectual Asset as it is probably more difficult to deliver tangible economic benefits to Scottish enterprises if they were to cast the net too wide at the beginning and include “Value Creation” (or innovation) processes from the very start. However, it should be noted that the practices of the IC Centres of the world are merging and both IC and IA are offered in most IC Centres; Asia Pacific Intellectual Capital Centre (APICC) chose to call itself an IC Centre (instead of an IP Centre or IA Centre) as it envisages that equal emphasis will be put on the “Value Creation” (IC) ,the “Value Extraction” (IA) and the “Value Release” processes.