Intellectual capital may have been a term invented by Wall Street to put a dollar value on the worth of a company that doesn’t show up on the balance sheet. We know that reputation is valuable and can bring more to the sale price. How smart your company is in terms of solving problems and generating revenue is equally as valuable. That organizational intelligence quotient (IQ) shows up when looking at an organization’s accumulated knowledge. Think about how we approach intellectual capital. Most organizations think of intellectual capital as the information that’s recorded in a computer database of lessons learned and other documentation of activities.
Intellectual capital is not documentation. It is the new knowledge that comes from people putting their heads together to solve a problem. It is also how people learn—from each other. When an employee asks another employee how to work a piece of software, that’s intellectual capital. If you give away people you lose your ability to generate those interactions, which puts you at a disadvantage with your competition.
From that case, actually we cannot create the intellectual capital in our company. We can start it by creating Employee Excitement through Learning. This fits very well with the schema of employees who see employment with any one company as a transitory step in their career progression. To be competitive in the move from company to company, they must do skills stacking, which can only be accomplished through learning and experiencing as much as possible along the way.
