Building a betterness portfolio means expanding our view of what a return on investment looks like.
When we talked about fostering human wealth, we noted the value of educating an individual. How she or he could use that education to create value in the future.
But in this discussion of intellectual wealth, instead of following the individuals, we’re going to focus more on the collective knowledge of a group, organization, or community.
These insights and ideas are formed and shaped by individuals, but ultimately become a shared asset once they are expressed. Other people can now use that information as inspiration for their own projects.
The question is, how can we as organizational leaders help grow the global knowledge base while running a successful venture ourselves?
A visit to the idea mansion
Think of our collective intellectual wealth like a giant Gatsby-like mansion. Common sense is the lively party outside, while specialized knowledge sits in small rooms where a handful of people have gathered.
It’s impossible and impractical to visit everywhere in this mansion, but we all have access to parts. Some of us more than others, given where we live, the resources available, and what we’ve been exposed to in our life.
But certain rooms are invite-only. And others are completely walled off to anyone outside of the organization that owns it.
Looking at this mansion as a whole, the combined intellectual wealth comes from the value of stored knowledge, conversations, and ideas exchanged across the entire plot. Being intentional about our role in this “mansion” benefits society by improving the overall discourse, but it’s also good for business.
The business value of ideas
We live in a knowledge economy where our ability to create and shape information is a major source of value. So valuable that patent trolling is a viable business model and corporations will buy out smaller companies just to keep the information to themselves. But walling off knowledge isn’t the only way to extract value from it.
Knowledge can be monetized in the form of a product or service. Ideas for improving efficiency can save an organization money when they take action. Sharing insights freely can attract new customers, partnerships, and opportunities.
But the payoff doesn’t need to be monetary. Ideas can influence by attracting attention and impacting people’s actions. Information can inspire people to solve problems in their own life, create new products or businesses, or become advocates for your company or message.
The value created by our organization goes beyond the physical objects we exchange and the numbers in our bank account. We can create value by helping employees, customers, and stakeholders access information. They can apply this knowledge as-is. Or use it as inspiration to drive further changes that impact their own lives and others in the world.
Some ways to create intellectual wealth with your betterness portfolio
- Improve access to existing knowledge (break down silos).
- Match people with the knowledge they need at that moment, to put the existing knowledge base to good use.
- Make it easier for people to share information with others that need it.
- Organize knowledge to provide support along an individual’s or a group’s journey from beginner to master.
- Curate and showcase existing knowledge in a way that allows people to extract new insights. (ex. infographics)
- Create forums, settings, or events for people to discuss and learn new topics.
- Provide space for people to explore seemingly unrelated fields and lines of inquiry.
- Issue an interesting challenge.
- Make thought leadership a component of your core business model and brand.
- Revive and protect important yet fading skills.
- Pass along or promote information from overlooked voices.
- Provide no-strings-attached funding for exploring ideas.
- Make individual knowledge available externally with templates, checklists, models, reports, interviews, and videos.
How to incorporate intellectual wealth generation into your portfolio process
You can fold an intellectual perspective into each of the portfolio essentials with a few tweaks.
Current State
What information does your organization have access to? Maybe you generated it in-house or collected it from external sources. Or perhaps you could gain access to it because of your network or financial means. Don’t forget the institutional knowledge that is currently stored in people’s heads.
Where is that information and how is it shared (or siloed)? Consider what’s in your knowledge base, the patents you have, stakeholder dynamics, the customer journey, employee expertise, and those powerpoints sitting on someone’s hard drive or buried in an obscure folder.
On the other side, what kinds of questions are customers, employees, and other stakeholders asking? What do they really need to know to achieve their goals that they’re not aware they should be asking about?
Future State
There’s a lot that you could focus on, but what do you want to be known for? Who or what will your business to focus on? Where’s the overlap between where you’d like to be seen as an expert and the questions that your customers or stakeholders have?
Value Framework
Gathering, creating, and sharing knowledge is straightforward. And the tools available make it easier than ever. But how do we know which knowledge would be more valuable?
Your business mission, strategic goals, or betterness criteria can be a good guide. Perhaps your goals are related to expanding your reach, helping customers achieve some outcome, or speeding up your time to market.
Consider adding criteria to your value framework to track if a change will significantly impact customer, stakeholder, or employee knowledge in a way that helps you achieve those goals.
Also, consider which information could be more valuable if it was shared vs. kept to yourself. For example, Pepsi and Coke share knowledge about sustainable technology but keep their drink recipes secret.
Portfolio Allocation
An enterprise portfolio that prioritizes intellectual wealth would allocate a higher percentage of resources to research, experimentation, and sharing knowledge. This portfolio would value novelty and looking at issues from new angles.
At the extreme, you have the model of a think tank or academic institution for inspiration, where knowledge is the product itself.
However many companies will find that it makes sense to blend knowledge generation with their marketing and customer service efforts. Knowledge sharing is a relatively simple way to add value throughout the customer experience and differentiate your brand.
Execution Support
Since building intellectual wealth is all about sharing ideas, execution support means improving transparency. It involves creating a useful and accessible knowledge base, sharing insights, and actionable information. It also looks like co-creation and co-research projects (like Enterprise Design Sprints) to help people learn from each other while making progress on key projects.
Don’t forget a healthy blend of theory and application, core principles and examples to help ground ideas into reality. And in the other direction, help people think about reality in new ways.
Research & Experimentation
Traditional book and article research, field studies, interviews, experiments, and prototypes all generate knowledge for the people involved. Consider incorporating your target stakeholders into the process.
Intake Process
Since information is so easy to access, curating, filtering, and organizing it is crucial to leverage the knowledge without getting overwhelmed by noise.
Set up newsfeeds with resources like Feedly, subscribe to publications sharing insights from your field, build a company library, and follow other thought leaders. Use software tools and AI to help the portfolio team members manage notes and uncover insights.
This information will mostly come in as reference info instead of fully-formed projects for the backlog. So link the reference to the corresponding portfolio essential (ex. potential change, current state insight, new ways to think about allocating the backlog). As you go, periodically review your reference base for insights that might now be applicable.
Dynamic Views
Presentations, Slack updates, lunch-and-learns, conferences, patents, posts, books, and reports are all ways to showcase the knowledge that was created in a package that resonates with the target audience. You could also track metrics about the creation of these artifacts to measure how prolific your organization is and how other people are responding to the knowledge you’re sharing.
Everything man-made started out as an idea. By paying more attention to how we manage our enterprise’s intellectual capital, we can both run successful businesses and equip our customers and communities with the information they need to address problems in the world.
How will you incorporate these ideas into your business? Do you have other ideas of how to build intellectual wealth with your enterprise portfolio?