Intangible assets remain definition bound and thus subjective. In brand and design practice, most professionals don’t acknowledge that what they are delivering as business service is considered a difficult return on investment for their clients.
There is a lack of consistent terminology in the literature relating to intangible assets and intellectual capital.Management scholars tend to employ either “capital” or “asset” terminology to refer to investments with no physical existence.
Lawyers refer to intellectual property, which has property rights in law. Accountants do not generally use the term “intellectual capital”.
Accountants refer to identifiable intangible assets, goodwill and intellectual property (with legal rights) under the umbrella of “intangible assets”.
Economists refer to intangible assets in terms of their source, as investments, and role in production, as capital. (Hunter, Webster, Wyatt, 2005)
As business-to-business services that deliver design, brand and marketing related services, practitioners should take note of the difficulty that clients have with working out expenditure justification. I think it is therefore important to assist the client in going through a transparent process of achieving mutual goals such as I described in my earlier post about the Consensio intangible asset chain.
I am reading ‘The Passion of the Western Mind’ by Tarnas and try to piece together the obvious argument, that our Western definition of intangible assets is a Platonist understanding of the subject.
We strive to match Plato’s world view when we describe the intangible as follows: we interpret the world in terms of archetypes (good-bad, beauty-ugly, single-multi, intangible-tangible, asset-non-asset…).We strive to define it by using changeless absolutes and look for the essence of universal truth and structure about ‘intangible assets’.
We ask what is the precise relation between the pattern of ‘intangible asset’ and the empirical world of everyday reality. Why is this important to the way we do business 2000 years later? (more…)
the focus on my studies for the next years will generally be on intangible assets and what they mean to Australia’s economy.
Since 2001, where Daley found that Australia is not utilising intangible assets (IA) to its full advantage, and therefore falling behind in R&D, something interesting has happened.
The economy boomed on the back of the mining and resource demand despite study findings that the IA driven economy is the sustainable future direction for developed nations.
The advocates of social capital and the creative class seem pretty silent after the dot com crash and amongst the gold rush mentality of the current mining boom in Western Australia.
Perth, Western Australia is a prime example of a state in an identity struggle for the quest to please existing and new citizens.
Although there is a movement to revitalise the city and a call to continue with the IA paradigm to ‘build a state of creativity’ , we are a far cry from amalgamating the operational with the mundane concept of ‘culture and the arts’ in this city. (more…)
