Intellectual Capital/Stewart 74-78

75 Where to Look for Intellectual Capital....Its people, its structures, and its customers.

Human Capital, Structural Capital, and Customer Capital.

76 ...certain that intellectual capital is the raw material from which financial results are made.

Human capital matters because it is the source of innovation and renewals, whether from brainstorms in a lab or new leads in a sales rep's little black book.

77 The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius. Compiling human knowledge into structural intellectual capital...quickly...take advantage of the worldwide trend.

Customer capital is the value of an organization's relationships with the people with whom it does business. It's the likelihood that our customers will keep doing business with us.

78 Customer capital shows up in complaint letters, renewal rates, cross-selling, referrals, the speed with which your phone calls are returned. Most important, it is manifest in learning, access, and trust.

The better that relationship, the more likely the buyer is to share its plans and expertise with the seller--that is, the more likely a company can learn with and from its customers and its suppliers. Shared knowledge is the ultimate form of customer capital.

Crucially, intellectual capital is not created from discrete wads of human, structural, and customer capital but from the interplay among them. Structural capital in the form of databases, computer networks, patents, and good management can augment the talent of an engineer; bad tools and bureaucrats can devalue it.

Intellectual capital is useless unless it moves