Intellectual Capital: Management Issues

In what specific ways could corporate culture drive a firm’s market value? If you can, provide what you think is an example of corporate culture that might contribute significantly to market value. Do we see the value of corporate culture identified on corporate balance sheets? Side question: can you measure corporate culture?

How might customer relationships be sources of value? What metrics might be particularly important in assessing an organization’s customer capital or the value of its customer relationships? Can you provide examples where one can see a close relationship between market value and the changing assessments of the quality of the customer relationship? Can you give examples of customer capital outside of the for-profit sector?

Human capital, while it is a key driver of value, leaves the office each evening. What sort of special Intellectual Capital (IC) management problems does this present for a firm?

Patents: Litigation and “Trolls”

I suspect you’ve all read about Apple and Samsung suing each other over patents. Google’s part of the story as well (it bought part of Motorola to acquire that company’s patents), and Blackberry (then called Research in Motion) paid something like $500 million for patent infringement.

The Blackberry litigation, in particular, was brought by a patent “troll”, a company that acquired title to a patent for something it didn’t invent.

Is there a legitimate role for such entities?