Backing the Ideas Generation

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Today’s businesses should be looking beyond the balance sheet at the unique value of their intellectual assets, says Dr Caroline Sincock. She explains to Edward Fennell how Scotland’s new Intellectual Assets Centre can help.

Thanks to the diligence of intellectual property lawyers and patent agents you could be forgiven for assuming that every possible area of business activity worth protecting has already been well secured with belts and braces. Well, the ‘braces’ are probably in place. But possibly not the ‘belt’. According to Dr Caroline Sincock, Chief Intellectual Assets Officer of the Intellectual Assets Centre (IA Centre) in Glasgow, there is a growing appreciation that many of the most important assets of business have been allowed to hang loose for too long. The time has come to buttress these neglected assets which, in the words of Dr Sincock, ‘underpin the knowledge economy’.

The way that Dr Sincock describes it, there is a huge new continent of assets which has reared into view just when businesses thought it had the world of intangible assets pretty well mapped. As a result, says Dr Sincock, there is an urgent need for a ‘change in the mindset’ in the way in which IP and assets are viewed. While a thorough job has been done on those ideas which can be patented or copyrighted, there has been too narrow a perspective on other assets. What businesses need to look at, she says, is the full range of intangible assets which contribute to the success of an organisation and represents its knowledge capital to the outside world.

A new discipline
’For example, in the case of one of the businesses we work with, probably the most important single piece of information was the mobile phone numbers of the chief executives of key clients and the ability to contact these people readily,’ explains Dr Sincock. ‘Yet something like that was not included in their investment plan. It may be hard to quantify or attribute value to, but it is a vitally important asset for the business. We now suggest that this kind of networking asset should be presented at least in narrative form when dealing with a bank or investors or other clients.’

Dr Sincock’s mission is to raise awareness of intangible assets and to help her clients to start documenting them by codifying the vast array of knowhow, show-how, contacts, insights and best practice which actually make their organisations a success. This is especially important for the SME community with whom the IA Centre mostly works. Set up just over a year ago with the backing of the Scottish Executive and part-funded by the EU, the centre is genuinely world leading. As Dr Sincock recalls, at the time when the idea for the centre was conceived, there were just five references to intellectual assets in Google. Now – not least due to the IA Centre – there are many more. But it remains an embryo field in which the key issues, approaches and techniques are still being sketched out. ’What we have found though, is that there is massive interest in the topic and in the kind of services we are offering,’ she says. ‘It really feels as if it is an idea whose time has come.’

Dr Sincock and her eight colleagues are currently ‘swamped’ with requests for help and invitations to speak and give advice. ‘The IA Centre’s aim is to help organisations add to their bottom line by managing and exploiting their intellectual assets,’ says Dr Sincock.

’What we have found though, is that there is massive interest in the topic and in the kind of services we are offering. It really feels as if it is an idea whose time has come.’

A welcome development
The initial idea for the centre was hatched in Scotland, says Dr Sincock, because of the country’s history as an engine of ideas and innovation especially among small businesses. At the time, Dr Sincock was working for Targeting Technology Ltd, an SME advisory agency in Glasgow. ‘We identified what seemed to be a gap in the market in advice,’ she says, ‘and when we ran a congress on the subject we confirmed just how much this was needed. There was a feeling that many of our SMEs were worth more than they might appear on paper so there was an appetite to identify and pin down where that additional value lay.’

It turned out that the ‘additional value’ was to be found in those very ‘intellectual assets’ which had largely been taken for granted or had never been crystallised or formulated. A couple of years later, therefore, with the backing of Scottish public institutions and the local professional community, the IA Centre was born. Now, working through a network of trained and approved associates, the IA Centre is able to give advice across Scotland to enable clients to start recording those assets so that they can be given value or, at the very least, proper recognition.

Dr Sincock compares the growing appreciation of intellectual assets with the value placed on human capital. A key part of the protection of intellectual capital is the codification of the ideas, information and practices in employees’ heads just in case they leave the firm – or defect to the opposition.

Often the protection interventions recommended by the centre are very practical. As Dr Sincock points out, many critical technical processes cannot be patented as such (or the patents may tell only half the story). Instead it may be necessary to hide the trade secrets ‘behind a black curtain’. Alternatively, processes may be broken up and kept separate so as to make it harder for rivals to penetrate them. This applies, for example, when a component is being manufactured by a subcontractor. ‘Rather than give the whole job to one agency, divide it up into parts and then do the assembly yourself – that way it makes it easier to safeguard.’

These are still very early days and many businesses who seek the IA Centre’s help don’t yet quite understand the questions they should be asking. But the IA Centre is pushing the boundaries out and establishing the territory. Its website provides a range of useful case-studies while its congress next February should go a long way towards establishing it in the mind of Scottish business.

The Intellectual Assets Centre is based in Glasgow, Scotland. For further information visit www.ia-centre.org.uk

This article first appeared in IP Review, issue 13

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