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Do You Know What Your Company’s Data Is Worth?

Harvard Business Review

For example, at the end of its 2015 fiscal year, Apple’s balance sheet stated tangible assets of $290 billion as a contribution to its annual revenues, with approximately $141 billion worth of intangible assets — a combination of intellectual capital, brand equity, and (investor and consumer) goodwill.

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How to Navigate a Digital Transformation

Harvard Business Review

Different industries and different business models have always maintained different percentages of these asset types. Manufacturers invest most of their capital into physical assets, while high-tech firms invest in R&D to create new intellectual capital. The first step is to pinpoint your starting place.

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Why Financial Statements Don’t Work for Digital Companies

Harvard Business Review

Curiously, companies are allowed to report purchased brands and intangibles as assets on balance sheet, creating distortions between earnings and assets of digital companies that rely on organic growth versus acquisitions. Its value growth is powered by the network in place, not by increments of operating costs.

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What Apple, Lending Club, and AirBnB Know About Collaborating with Customers

Harvard Business Review

But these co-creation models produce only one-off physical goods, and none represents a fundamental shift in how these companies create value; they’re peripheral to the core business. homes and cars) and intangible (e.g. Customer co-creation is central to the Network Orchestration business model.

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Why We Shouldn’t Worry About the Declining Number of Public Companies

Harvard Business Review

All three factors have become more common over time, which we argue stems from firms’ increasing reliance on intangible and knowledge inputs in their business models. Digital firms are as valuable for their intangible capital as were the 20 th century firms for their land, building, and factories.

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Research: The Digitization of Banks Disproportionately Hurts Women Entrepreneurs

Harvard Business Review

As banks rush to digitize their operations , many have found that closing their local branches can help maintain a high return on an otherwise pricy transformation. These meetings allowed for the exchange of important information about the business model, intangible assets, future prospects, and more.

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What the Companies That Predict the Future Do Differently

Harvard Business Review

Consider the example of a manufacturer of production equipment that collects sensor-based telemetry about its machines’ operations, the status of their parts, their performance, their resource consumption, and other data. This monitoring turns up an anomaly at a key customer that indicates a failure is imminent.