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Collaboration as an Intangible Asset

Harvard Business Review

Interestingly, intangible assets are all the rage these days on Wall Street. There is no line on the balance sheet for "ability to innovate" or "skill at managing brand." Marvelous, but if it's invisible, how do you see an intangible asset or collaboration, for that matter? What are you doing to cultivate them?

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Why Leaders Are Still So Hesitant to Invest in New Business Models

Harvard Business Review

Today, the majority of market value is made up of intangible assets (networks, platforms, intellectual property, customer relationships, big data) more than physical assets. In fact, it’s not even close: intangible assets make up over 80% of the S&P 500’s market value — a complete reversal from 1975.

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What Younger Workers Can Learn from Older Workers, and Vice Versa

Harvard Business Review

What we asked people was, at this point in their lives, are they actively building, maintaining, or depleting their tangible and intangible assets? Actively building both tangible and intangible assets is crucial to creating a long and productive working life. How to build diverse networks. Why might this be so?

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What’s Driving Superstar Companies, Industries, and Cities

Harvard Business Review

Today’s superstar sectors tend to have higher R&D intensity, higher skill intensity and lower capital and labor intensity than other sectors. The higher returns in superstar sectors accrue more to corporate surplus more than labor and flow to intangible capital such as software, patents, and brands.

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How to Navigate a Digital Transformation

Harvard Business Review

That includes identifying your current mix of assets and the business model that your asset portfolio creates. For example, do you make and sell things, hire skilled employees and provide services, develop and new IP like software or pharmaceuticals, or build and manage digital networks, be they transactional, informational, or social?

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The Answer to Short-Termism Isn’t Asking Investors to Be Patient

Harvard Business Review

An informed shareholder, who looks beyond earnings numbers and analyzes the company’s intangible assets, would notice that the firm has mortgaged its future. Gathering information on a firm’s intangible assets is costly, and so not worth doing if you own only a tiny bit of stock in a company.

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Profit Is Less About Good Management than You Think

Harvard Business Review

.” Value investors like Graham and Buffett believe that the sources of sustainable returns on capital are not a company’s human assets but their so-called “economic moats,” structural, durable competitive advantages around revenues or costs.