Measuring Intangibles: Managing Intangibles for Tangible Outcomes in Research and Innovation

Knowledge sharing is critical to the success and survival of companies in knowledge intensive industries. It is essential to effectively measure knowledge creation and sharing to facilitate good investment decision making in knowledge management initiatives. Investments in people and tools are the primary assets used in the creation of knowledge. An organization needs to understand what knowledge it is generating, how to capture it, and how to go about easily disseminating it. Tighter budgets are leading CEOs to ask for an accounting of the investments in knowledge management. In articulating value, one must understand how much value currently exists, how value is being retained, and what potential value is in the pipeline. It will take time to develop the cause and effect linkages but we will improve our ability to do so with confidence that the relationships are valid. The primary challenges are whether solutions that are found for a specific case can be generalized and how to rationalize the proportion of benefit allocated to value adding components of knowledge management. Existing program management measurements have been applied to tangible outcomes of knowledge sharing, however intangible benefits may be slightly more elusive. This paper will focus on the identification of intangible benefits, the cause and effect relationships, and the applicability of existing metrics to these intangibles. The premise is that existing measurements may not apply. The development of new metrics for managing intangible assets to obtain tangible outcomes is a necessity. Keyword(s): Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management Metrics, Managing Intangible Assets, Knowledge Creation, Knowledge Extraction, Knowledge Use